It makes a great deal of sense to have a soul farm located in the astral plane layered above a physical church. Imagine what sort of spiritual current they could extract from the parishioners when they are entranced in prayer or singing their psalms. While their bodies are in the building, I imagine that their astral selves could be fitted into that infernal machinery I saw. Now I'm curious to see whether such apparatuses are present at most houses of worship.

As for lucid dreaming, I just got lucky to have been born with the gift. However I have been able to refine that skill by keeping a dream journal, practicing environmental awareness of sensations while awake, and regular meditation which takes me into a trance state similar to dreaming. While I'm in a trance, I practice by imagining movement with my astral body and trying to fool myself into believing that I am already dreaming. That last technique was essential to being able to manipulate the astral environment itself, as I've only recently cracked it. I've been able to grow extra limbs, shapeshift, project lightning, fly, change the tangiblity of objects and teleport malevolent entities away from me. Once, I made an inanimate astral object animated and used it as a lure to get a "dogman" to chase it instead of me. Really fun stuff at first, but lately there's a lot of malevolence in the astral realm. Something big is going down.