What you're describing kind of fits with my experience too. I've drifted away from deliberately practising lucid dreaming over the years (mainly because I rarely get the chance to sleep in any more, which was lucid prime-time in the past), and have been having mini lucid episodes like you describe pretty much every night. As you say, moments of lucidity emerge for me in response to negative situations or emotions, and generally serve to improve the situation before receding. For example, I haven't had a full-blown nightmare for years (due to this), but any time I'm threatened in a dream, I seem to "clock in" and use this awareness to either destroy the monster/antagonist or do something that makes it less threatening. Then it's back to dreaming as usual, no lucidity.
It has been pretty handy and I suppose has led to years of totally peaceful (dream-wise) sleep, but I don't know if I'd say it's a directed or adaptive mechanism with the function of ensuring peaceful sleep. I think it's quite common for lucid dreamers to become lucid in response to a dreamed threat, but I imagine that people deal with the threat in many different ways, e.g. waking themselves up or engaging in a long, drawn-out dream battle - things not necessarily conducive to peaceful sleep.
I think it's a consequence of extended lucid-dreaming practice, kind of a residual ability that doesn't take much effort (unlike becoming fully lucid and staying that way for as long as possible). Whether or not it ends up being used to deliver peaceful, unconscious dreaming is probably more to do with characteristics of the individual.
I'm 24 and this started happening to me over the last 3-or-so years, but I don't think age is a factor in this change I've noticed. For me it's definitely lifestyle-related and at least partly due to the fact that I haven't had time to engage in much deliberate lucid dreaming for a while.
Your research area sounds really interesting, have you written anything you wouldn't mind me reading (maybe link through PM rather than posting publicly, up to you)? Or could you recommend a good paper for someone new to the area? My main research interest is in perception/action and motor skill learning, so I've at least got a Psychological base to start from.
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