I would say in my experience it is very similar. When I am lucid I have to learn the rules so to speak, and then I can bend them, also letting go of all that you have learned is another thing... "free your mind" sorta thing...

That movie messed with my head, not because I thought we are all in some computer simulation, but because I beleive this to be not much different from the dream world, and that splinter that morpheus spoke of is jammed in the back of my mind as well.