Recurring Dream Sign without becoming lucid!

Every week I have at least one dream involving a big underground fighting tournament where people fight to death. Sometimes I am lucid, and other times I fail to realize it is a dream. It would seem logical that I should become lucid every time I have a dream involving this, because it is a recurring dream sign after all! Yet sometimes I just fail to become lucid. Why is this?

It looks kind of like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Octagon, but there is a higher platform where the audience is sitting, and under that is the cage (also in octagon shape). Basically I am always sitting in the audience, cheering and clapping.

The tournament is run by a guy with a greek name -- Ikarus. He looks kinda goofy, with a big moustache like Salvador Dali (the painter). :D

It is just mind boggling why I fail to become lucid even though this dream (or variations of it) occurs quite a lot!

It's because your consciousness is asleep. We become aware of the oddities and recurring elements in our dreams because of rising consciousness at that particular moment, not the other way around. Let me explain it a bit more -- dreams are full of oddities, right? Then why can't we notice any of them? Simple. It's because our consciousness is in deep sleep. When consciousness somehow enters the dream, we are very likely to start noticing odd things. Take a look at other people's dream journals, you will see that people often "just become lucid" without any reason. This is why WBTB works. By becoming fully awake, then skip right into the REM part of a sleep cycle, we bring our consciousness into our dreams, thus giving much greater chance to become aware within the dream.

That makes sense.