I seem to have this aversion to what I find myself calling "full lucidity"; that is, I don't like breaking an ok dream situation to become god-emperor, and I don't usually have anything specific in mind that I want to do before falling asleep (sometimes I get something vague, and those work out so rarely that I could paste my notes on those happening in an LW comment).

That aside, I tried to sciencify my dream-plotting starting April 2012 (I did something vaguely similar in 2005 and wrote a terrible paper on it). Some things of note:

• Understanding the context of "How did I get here, and does it make sense?" is incredibly difficult. When I managed to force myself to start asking this, I just found myself "remembering" more absurd backstories; for example, wondering why someone from college was at my highschool led me to think "Of course, it all started with an adventure on a pirate ship..."
• Trying to force anything to happen in dreams with advanced planning, short of mastering full lucidity, almost never works. I got something somewhat like this to happen once (by trying to imagine how it would work if it was a dream until I wound up in a shallow sleep), and another from the end of August 2013 on which I took very few notes and don't quite remember how it happened other than it was a slow process with lots of deliberate universe-building in the falling-asleep process.
• For a while, I got very good at the "check numbers for consistency" technique. Once, I tried to repeat this experiment several times and remember the details for when I woke up, while attempting to will the numbers to appear a certain way. I only remembered a few of the target-result pairs by the time I started recording them in real life, but the results were pretty clear (It was a serious struggle to get the exact numbers I wanted, but I could consistently get very close, within 1-3 of the target).
• Visual details. My vision nosedived in the second half of 2002, and dream vision took much longer to decline, until the present, where it's rarely any better than real life. I made a conscious attempt to study this and try to improve visual sensation in dreams, and my conclusion is that I can force very crappy visuals to happen when lucid, but it takes a lot of effort and isn't all that worth it. However, if I'm in a situation where I need visual information, or the information is most obviously obtained visually (especially if there is time pressure), then visuals are much more vivid. Examples include reading numbers on a TV screen, needing to memorize the positioning of different-colored fireworks (that one involved a time-turner and had the clearest colors in quite some time), reading a map and checking my arm for marks that wouldn't stick out to touch.
• Body map! I only remember altering this intentionally for sure once, and that was a situation where I was trying to go full lucid because the original dream was boring and I was feeling sciency (I turned myself into a giant spider, was deliberately vague about individual appendages, and completely failed to pay enough attention to my mouth parts to successfully eat a captured fly). Dreams have screwed with my body without lucidity quite a lot, though; I've been physically younger, have mysteriously had certain body parts multiply, etc; these tend to return to present-realistic if I ever go lucid, though (I once attained lucidity in the middle of a dream whose first half had me in second grade, and I've tried and failed at changing genders). There are two examples I can think of that might subvert this trend, but how lucid I was in either is not so clear; there was one that I deliberately prolonged by focusing on music when I realized I was about to wake up and the plot was unfinished, and that was a deaged situation. A more recent one felt less lucid, though did involve me calling on Yahweh (by name) a couple times, once to get me to a bridge I couldn't find, and once to save me and someone else from falling off a ladder (we were both approximately 6 years old). (To make the rationality, or lack there of, weirder in this case, I wound up calling to Yahweh only after my father abandoned me, once by going across the bridge without me, the second time by straight-up vanishing, which I assumed was because he woke up. I mentioned enough of this after waking to confirm that he didn't have the same dream, so this dream-me was clearly mistaken regarding quite a few things. Also, the deaging in that one came after a lengthy alternate present sequence.).

I kinda feel like I ramble about this too much whenever the topic comes up. Maybe I could just start a "dream experiments" blog so I can keep my LW comments shorter in the future?