Apparently I have lucid dreams and this is not something that I try to do, I didn't even know what it was until I started Googling some things about my own sleep patterns.

I have suffered from horrible nightmares for about 7 years now and at a certain point I was able to know when I was dreaming, it doesn't always happen, but it has happened frequently and makes my nightmares less frightening. It happens sometimes in really good dreams, too, and I don't want to wake up because I know it is just a dream. There have been some instances where I question myself whether or not I'm dreaming and ask several characters in my dream if I am in fact dreaming. I was wondering if anyone else was a lucid dreamer without trying to be.

Also, I sometimes have dreams within dreams, 4 or 5 layers deep, but when I wake up from one of the dreams within a dream, I don't "wake up" to what appears to be my real life, it is always still very abstract. From what I've read about dreams within dreams, usually you wake up in the 2nd dream and it resembles your real life. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this, too.