When things magically "switch" on you!

Not sure what to call this but every time I dream this always happens and I almost never recognize it until later when I dream recall. Basically, a good example is what happened in my latest dream. My grandma was coming at me with a knife and somehow it came apart and I tried blocking her from stabbing me, and when the other piece broke off it pierced her skin but as she was stabbed it was "no longer" my grandma and instead my mother. This is where "the switch" comes into play.

When things just magically change and you don't recognize it. What do we call this? It's strange that we don't become lucid because my grandma even "awoke" and started coming down the stairs after I told her to call 9-11 after my mother was stabbed when it was actually her to begin with.

If you've had this happen before, did you become lucid and what was your experience with it?
-Chase

I actually had this happen the last time that I was lucid. I was at a beach just getting the feel for dreaming and I kept jumping in the water. My mom was there and she jumped in as well but could not swim, so i took her to shore when she transformed into some random dude i have never seen before. But yeah besides that I have this happen a lot in non lucids but it never triggers lucidity for me either, pretty interesting. I dont know if there is an official term for when this happens, maybe you could call it unstable dream character or something. It sure would be nice to be able to utilize this for achieving lucidity because it does seem pretty common.

That's normal dream behaviour; I'm pretty sure there isn't a specific name for it. Sometimes stuff like what you've described happens when I'm lucid, sometimes when I'm not; I never actually become lucid from these occurrences, though. Also, more often than not, only small details of things change - the font of graffiti on a wall can change when I look away and look back, for instance. It rarely happens with DCs for me. Sometimes I summon them and they don't look quite right (their face is off, or something), so I look away and then back at them again; if I visualize hard enough they will look better, more normal. But that's more dream control than anything else.

Maybe the fact that things are switching on someone while they're lucid just means they aren't visualizing or taking memory of their surroundings enough? In that case, it might just take practice and then things will stop changing.