Spring Dreamin'

I'm a lucid dreamer. Always have been. It's usually entertaining, as long as I don't try to psychoanalyze myself. Sometimes though, I have the worst dreams. Excrutiatingly detailed looks at my failures and impotence. Occasionally, these worst dreams even become nightmares. (A bad dream is typically classified as a nightmare if you are woken up by it.) Whatever type of dream, I usually recall them in a richness of detail that would make any filmmaker blush at her inadequacies. The memories have a tendency to remain clear for years- I still remember in vivid detail the first nighmare I had when I was eleven and newly in the sixth grade.
One of the features of lucid dreams, is that often the dreamer recognizes it's a dream, and may even have some degree of control over what occurs in the dream. I often figure out that it's a dream, but in a paranoid way. Let me explain. A family member or close friend who has died will be in the dream as if nothing ever happened, or as if they had just been on an extended vacation. I react with, "My God! How can this be? You're dead!" Sometimes I'm convinced by the workings of the dream that I have been under some dastaredly misapprehension for a number of years. But, more often than not, I figure out that I'm right and that I must be in a dream. Sometimes the dreams are so real and well, trivial, that it makes me question reality upon waking. And when the questioning is about whether someone you have cared for deeply is really dead- ya; not that fun. [Philosophically speaking, I am very interested in this topic. What is it to be alive? and all that. But, when I'm trying to drag ass out of bed in the morning...I don't want to try and figure out if my Grandmother is still dead.]