Awareness=Dream failure

Hello everyone, this is my first post on this site and I am very interested in the science of dreaming. I hope it will be a great experience. Now to the point of the post.

I have had virtually no training regarding lucid dreaming, however in almost every dream I have, save very long ones I always figure out I'm dreaming.

However there is a major problem with that. When ever I DO figure it out, all the characters in the dream cease to exist, become completely unresponsive, or very VERY strange things start happening.

A few examples: I've dreamed that I was a British colonial captain and I washed up on the shore of Haiti. However, I saw the water had too blue of a tint for an inland harbor. Then EVERYTHING froze, including the water, my body walked out into it and I floated into SPACE!

This happens all the time and I have only managed once to hold it and got to fly around my home town for a while, yet everyone was frozen, and even then I had only managed to escape my body and didn't actually 'fly'.

Does anyone have some tips to fix this? Do I have to stay aware of the fact that it is a dream or do I just roll with it?

Work on dream control. There are a heap of tutorials on the site regarding that particular topic.
I'm really jealous of how easily you become lucid. :)

These things have probably just become habit / expectation. Maybe you could come up with a simple plan or goal to accomplish next time you're lucid. Drill it into your brain, so you can begin right away next time you're lucid.