A novel dimming control scheme, termed as generalized dimming control (GDC), is proposed for visible light communication (VLC) systems. The basic idea of GDC is to exploit adaptively time, spatial and signal domain resources for enhancing communication performance under practical illumination constraints. In particular, to satisfy the illumination constraints, an incremental algorithm for index mapping is first proposed to achieve target optical power and uniform illumination. Next, GDC having the optimal activation pattern is investigated to improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance of VLC. In particular, the BER performance of GDC is analyzed using the union bound technique. Based on the analytical BER bound, the optimal activation pattern of GDC scheme having the minimum BER criterion (GDC-MBER) is obtained by exhaustively searching all conditional pairwise error probabilities. However, since GDC-MBER requires high search complexity, two low-complexity GDC schemes having the maximum free distance criterion (GDC-MFD) are proposed. The first low-complexity GDC-MFD scheme, termed as GDC-MFD1, is derived by a lower bound of the free distance using the Rayleigh-Ritz theorem. The second low-complexity GDC-MFD scheme, termed as GDC-MFD2, is proposed to reduce further the computation by exploiting the time-invariance characteristics of the VLC channel. Simulation and numerical results show that GDC-MBER, GDC-MFD1 and GDC-MFD2 have similar BER performance, and they can achieve more than 3 dB SNR gains compared with conventional dimming control schemes for a BER of 10 ^-4 and a dimming level of 50%.