"Sentient" dream people

[Iain]

Ahoy. I've been lucid dreaming all my life, but I only learned around age 10 that other people generally don't experience lucidity in dreams. Or, probably more common, they don't realize what the experience was or remember it in the morning, and they certainly don't talk about it. I used to actively practice the exploration and adventure aspect of lucid dreaming. Flying came naturally, and is now the normal way in which I move in dreams... I can't remember the last time I actually noticed having legs in a dream, or tried to use them. I just kind-of float everywhere. Summoning people or changing my surroundings were always harder, but possible. At around 18 I stopped actively pursuing lucid dreaming. At the time I had an illness that interfered with my sleeping, and I don't remember dreaming much at all. There were times where I felt like I hadn't dreamed in two years. Once I hit twenty three, or thereabouts, the dreams had come back to normal frequency, but they were different now. The lucidity was different in that I wasn't trying to attain the same level of consciousness as when I'm awake. In fact, I wasn't trying to be conscious at all, but I was. In all my dreams now I know that I'm in a dream (even if I'm not conscious in the same way I am while I'm awake) and all my "dream powers" come standard. (One of my newest "powers" is the ability to reshape / resize objects. If I ever need something, I pick up a grain of sand or a pebble and form it into the object I need, no matter how complicated.) That's all background info. I've always known that the "people" in my dreams only know so much as myself (though they also have the same ability to be creative that I have, and can, technically, be the instruments through which I provide myself with insights). That's just the thing, they are parts of my mind. Try telling that to one of them, though! Last year sometime I tried that, and it didn't go over so well. It's a little bit more complicated than just being part of my mind, they are projections of everything that I know about people. So when I told this dream person that he was simply part of my mind, and that he should therefore go along with my plan, he responded how I would expect a person like him to. He told me I was full of shit, and to bugger off. This last year I've had a lot of fallout from that experience. Put together the fact that people in my dreams have access to all my knowledge (they know everything I know), and that a 45 year old man in my dreams thinks and reacts how I would expect a 45 year old man to think and react. Now you have people who know that they're dream images yet who still act like people. Last week I was having a dream which was otherwise ordinary and unremarkable (except being able to read several lines of text, I'm getting better at that, I think). At one point I passed by a woman (a dream "extra", in other words not someone from real life or an important person in the dream). I walked up to her, said hello, etc., and tried to kiss her. She turned away and refused, saying that she was nothing to me except another dream conquest, and that I'd be off with some other floozy the next night - that I wasn't really in love with her. Confused, I responded that she was a dream, a part of my mind. She countered that it was just as much her mind as it was mine. I've never been so shamed by anyone, real or imaginary. This is a trend which is becoming more pronounced in my dreams, though the word "sentient" in the title is just hyperbole. I'm a little curious and excited to see how autonomous different parts of my mind will become in these dreams.. I'm wondering if anyone else has any experience with anything similar.