Now if you practice threw the right type of meditation you can control the images.
Controlled dreams are possible yes... don't know if "meditation" is the right word. It's more of a type of conditionning, and even then it's impossible to control every dream (most of which we forget anyway) because we need a certain level of awakening to be able to have that control.
Then again, it's not so much control of the dream than an ability to keep on dreaming
even when already awakened, a state of mind in which you can control your own thoughts (and since dreams are thoughts...).
OBE and astral projection happen in the dream relm. Shamans used to think that the dreamrelm was a journey threw the spiritual world. Where they were able to talk to the dead and gaurdian animals. If you are always dreaming of a certain animal its most likely your spiritual animal. It will either appear with you or it will be apart of you. Like my animal appears when Im in a dark dream. The dark dream is most likely caused by stress. Considering that my dark dream is of zombies.
If you always dream of a certain animal, it's probably because that animal has been important in your life as a whole and especially in your recent memories. If you come to associate said animal with dreaming, the likelihood of seeing it appear in your dreams increases further since it becomes ingrained in your brain to go seek out its image without being prompted to when dreaming.
For example if you go to sleep thinking "I might dream of zombies tonight, but it'll be okay because my spirit animal will protect me", the chances of you actually dreaming of being protected from zombies by your spirit animal increases enormously. If it becomes a normal part of your everyday life to see zombies as THE #1 spiritual threat and your animal totem as your protector, the chances are increased further.
It's some kind of an ever-repeating circle : the more it happens, the more meaningful it appears to you, the more it happens.
We all have mental and spiritual safeguards while we sleep. Its what helps us from not being killed in the dreams. Thats why we wake up right before an 18 wheeler from nowhere hits us. Or never hitting the bottom of the long fall off a buildings.
The intense stress would be what wakes us up here. It's just that the moment when you're about to get hit by the truck or hit the bottom of the pit is when the stress gets most intense, so it's likely that's when we wake up if it hasn't happened earlier already.
This can also be explained by the brain's tendency to accept weirdness, but only to a certain extent. When things go overboard, wires cross and it goes "durrrh, wait" and goes back to wake mode as a kind of reflex. That's why we sometimes go "Wait that doesn't make sense" in dreams and almost instantly wake up - something pushed us to "wake mode", be it an outside factor, intense emotions (fear, stress...) from the dream itself (and obviously there's a direct link between wariness and fear/stress, so the brain has a natural tendency to avoid sleep patterns when those emotions arise) or a trigger that confuses the brain. In the case of the 18-wheel truck, that trigger could be the fact that the brain... has no idea what that feels like, and tries *hard* to find the info it needs in your memories, except it can't. Result, it goes "durrrh" and wakes up because the whole thing confuses it and it "realizes" the feelings you have are not compatible with the situation.
I wouldn't be surprised, however, to hear people who actually got hit by an 18-wheeler and survived could dream it and *keep on dreaming* after being hit, because the brain relates to it easily and doesn't go "wait that makes no sense, WTF am I doing". That's why a dreamed punch often won't wake you, but a gunshot will - you KNOW a gunshot shouldn't feel like it feels in the dream, but the brain doesn't know the real feeling so it substitutes something... while at the same time getting completely confused because it knows this isn't right. But again, someone who has already been shot is very likely to not wake up from a dreamed gunshot because the brain will go fetch that gunshot from memory and apply the feeling, satisfying itself in thinking that's close enough.
I believe that all our dreams are messages either from your own subconscious or the spirits. We just need to stop and listen to what is being told.
I don't believe in spirits, but the subconscious part is not too far off. Dreams can help you identify your current feelings and emotions better - I don't believe in those crappy metaphors, but, for example, dreaming in very dark colors that everyone's walking slowly and staring at the ground and everything is blurry like if you had tears in your eyes can obviously indicate you're depressed since those are generally admitted sorrowful images which the brain goes fetch to add to related things to try and make sense of the mishmash of images dreams are basically consisting of.
In your case Timber, it seems you have associated, consciously and/or not, zombies with stressful situations (and vice versa), but have become used to being saved by your animal totem when zombies are around. Therefore, zombies might appear out of nowhere in a completely unrelated stressful dreams, because your brain will go "'kay, what's associated with stress... exams, zombies, bungee jumping, etc" and will pick some of those elements.
