Wow, I really enjoyed the OP. It's these kind of threads that keep me coming.

(^This is all I was going to post but I got carried away...)

This is obviously the part that I have been neglecting in my lucid dream practice. My lucid dreams have heightened awareness and they are always about attentive exploration of the surrounding world. But they usually lack any satisfying memory of my life outside the dream. That is why, I will often begin thinking the dream is actually an alternate plane that I have accessed and start to act as if I am in a real world.

The excitement, is that although I don't consider myself a complete beginner at lucid dreaming, I now realize that I might never have experienced a true "lucid dream" (as opposed to the broadly accepted definition: "having the knowledge that you are dreaming.")

The truth is that, knowledge is very different to things such as intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to use knowledge and new events. I can know words in Spanish for example, but not be able to use them. In the same sense, having the knowledge that you are dreaming doesn't mean you have what it takes to truly understand the implications of it, and how to apply the knowledge.

For example, as people have been stating, it is common for us to remember some things like "This person is a person I know in real life, they're my friend.", "I have this dream goal to climb Mont Everest" or "I have an exam tomorrow" but these are merely small recollections, not a true access to memory, to who you are and in what context you are.

Going back to the language example, imagine you forgot all English words and in dreams, you could only remember "Eat", "The", "Family", surely, that could not be any good. We need access to all of it, or most of it anyways.

Anywho, I now finally understand the importance of "memory" in lucid dreaming, and I will be adding it in my practice of self-awareness and intention.

That is interesting Sivason, that you would sometimes have cut-off points. I wish I could compare with my own experience but I just now realize how inexperienced I am, and that just makes it all so much more exciting for me.