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The people capable of controlling their dream are called lucid dreamers, they have the ability to experience awareness during their dreams by re-awakening some aspects of their waking consciousness. They can even take control and act with intention in the dream world.
Many people say that there is such a thing as scripting your dreams. And there truly is a level of dream consciousness in which it seems that your cognitive mind does script the way our dreams unfold. The reality, though, is that our unconscious mind is still in complete control of the scripting of our dreams, and is simply using our cognitive mind’s participation as a part of the symbolic statement of the dream. Likewise, the thoughts we have about the possible meaning of our dream are typically also an extension of the dream, and should be interpreted for their symbolic meaning just as the rest of the dream must be. We must understand this point; it is our cognitive mind that is the source of all of our problems. Our unconscious mind is working constantly to resolve the problems our cognitive mind generates in its subjective attempts at living out our life. Our problem is not those terrible things that our unconscious mind generates. Our problem is that we have so lost harmony with our unconscious mind that we no longer know how to understand what it is saying to us. We do not need to silence our dreams or the other contents emerging from our unconscious mind. We need to properly understand what it is attempting to tell us. Trying to tell our unconscious mind to do is exactly the worst thing we could ever do to ourselves.
Before you attempt to control your dreams you need to be aware of them. Lucid Dreaming is the major stepping stone to gain that kind of control.
The thing with awareness is you may be able to wake yourself up if you aren’t enjoying the content – which in itself is a form of control. There are ways to experiment with this kind of stuff, I know it’s not in a dream but try closing your eyes and visualizing something of your choice, be it an artpiece or a simple mathematic model or whatever you feel the most comfortable with a visual representation of. Then see if you can… draw with your eyes (while still closed) maybe you can insert an object in your vision, be aware this may take concentration so other aspects of your visualization may suffer or even vanish completely but that’s ok, we’re only experimenting… you may not necessarily (although there isn’t anything to stop you) use that technique in an actual dream, I know I rarely do, I tend to find more organic ways, like reaching out of view for a towel, the expectation that a towel is what I am reaching for often does the hard work for me – I didn’t need to draw in a towel or force it to appear by taking my concentration from other elements of the dream. Other things you may be able to do if you have an idea in mind – which does take some amount of control already so maybe not for beginners – if something heads down a track that you dislike or you predict something you’d rather instead, pausing things, I guess one of the things about this trick is really to be aware that you have the power to do that, once nothing is moving and everything is still you can tweak or modify where things are, perhaps even rewind events and make a different choice.