Have i been lucid dreaming for years?

hi im adam 16 years old lately i've been experimenting with sleep deprivation and i came across lucid dreaming upon doing a little more research i think i've been lucid dreaming for years. im not sure though i'd like someone to tell me what they think. ok for years as long as i can remember i've always been aware of my dreams. whenever i have a dream i always know that im in it sometimes i can control little things in my dreams like for instance a few weeks ago i was having some dream about something idk but i was in my room and there was a small black octopus like tentacled thing on my floor then i started to think about hot girls and it morphed into a smoking hot woman. so is this lucid dreaming? im not really sure

Welcome to the forums, if you are aware that you are dreaming and have free control it is considered a lucid dream. So yes, it sounds like you have been having lucid dreams.

Yes, you have.

Until about a week ago I did not know I had been lucid dreaming for years, either. Apparently a lot of people have LDs and don't even realize that the term exists. So welcome to the forum! There are a lot of interesting people here with experiences and advice that will help you expand your abilities in the dream world. It is pretty neat. :D

Yep, that's lucid dreaming.
I've had lucid dreams all my life, but I didn't know what exactly lucid dreaming was.
I always understood that being aware that I'm dreaming would allow me to take a certain degree of control over my dreams though.

I recently started asking a lot of my friends if they ever had a lucid dream (I didn't use the term lucid dream, I asked them if they ever had a dream where they realized that it was indeed a dream)
I was positively surprised that about 1 out of 4 would immediately tell me that they have.
Most of them also said that they some form of control over the dream or started doing physically impossible things, such as flying.
It doesn't seem to be uncommon.