Thread: Hi... anybody else dream like this?

Well... I signed up for this website a looong time ago, but haven't touched it since, and re-registered as I'd forgotten my username and the e-mail I used to sign up XD

Anyway... I've been lucid dreaming for as long as I can remember, and have always had fairly good dream recall, though I rarely have any control over my dreams, even my own actions. I came here hoping to learn a bit more about controlling my dreams. When I was little, maybe four or five, I started having recurring nightmares quite frequently, many of which still scare the living daylights out of me when I look back on them. I still have recurring dreams, but not nightmares as much anymore. I learned, at some point when I was a kid, to repeat "it's just a dream" over and over, and I would wake up. After learning this, it didn't take me long to learn to recognize dreams and wake myself up.

After reading this site though, I've noticed that I never "figure out" that I'm dreaming, I just "know." There's no period of questioning, just all of a sudden it will occur to me that I'm dreaming. I wonder if this has something to do with the way I experience dreams, and if anybody else has the same thing. When I read other people's descriptions of their dreams, or of how they figure out that they're dreaming, I feel like my way of experiencing dreams is not the norm:

I don't know if it's simply the way I remember them or not, but my dreams do not feel real. If a dream lasts more than about five or ten minutes (from the dream perspective), I will just suddenly know that I'm dreaming. My "dream world" is, as best as I can describe it, fuzzy, and very much like watching a screen. I have no peripheral vision, and everything is distorted and white around the edges (yes, a lot like dream sequences or flashbacks on TV). There's always a general feeling of "floating," and I feel like I'm wrapped up in blankets and moving slowly (even if I'm not, within the dream), and tilted sideways (always to the right, even if I'm on my left side when I wake up). I think this is part of the reason I have such trouble exerting any control over my dreams. Once I'm lucid, I'm constantly having to fight against this weirdness just to walk around, let alone do anything else (though sometimes I can manage flying, and once I managed to change the scene), and it's such a powerful reminder that I'm sleeping, that I keep thinking about the fact that I'm asleep, and wake myself up.

So I guess, what I'd really like to know: is my dream experience uncommon? Or am I misinterpreting the things people say about their dreams, and this is actually normal? And is there anything I can do within my dreams, once I've become lucid, to make them "more real" so that I'm not having to constantly fight against them? Even when I try to just "go with it" I feel like I'm having to drag myself around, and again, just end up waking myself up because I can't help thinking about the fact that I'm sleeping.