If I’m in a nightmare (and recognized this fact in a dream), I generally can wake myself up. (I have very vivid nightmares …)
If I don’t like what I’m doing in a dream, and my behavior/actions keep repeating, I can wake myself up.
My dreams often feature me packing up / trying to get away / and everything gets complicated and harder to do and I just can’t ever seem to finish, and actually GET AWAY. Then I’ll try to wake myself out of the dream.
I invent fabulous flowers and cityscapes in my dreams / often in color / or treacherously black (nightmares – got lost in Chicago IN MY DREAM, and this would NEVER happen in real life) …
Breathing underwater. Usually starts out as some weird scenario involving me drowning… I’m afraid, and holding my breath, then I’m relieved I can breathe, and my dream proceeds into that wild exploration.
I don’t fly, so much as I can hover. It always seems surprising at first, then I realize I can float/hover just as easily as walking. Some mental thought to where and how I want to defy gravity, but it’s always a cool dream.
Other than that, dreams can be hyper-specific and at the same time, completely vague. Sometimes people I know, or houses I grew up in are not at all the same, but in my dream, it doesn’t even register. Only when I wake up, I’m like… my mom isn’t Kathy Bates. She looks and acts NOTHING like Kathy Bates! Except that one time she called me a Dirty Birdie.
I’ll also have dreams of me playing the guitar like a god. I’ll even write music, with a what seems a great melody and lyrics.
Then I wake up, and remember I can’t play guitar. I’m not even a musician. And from what I remember, those lyrics were gibberish. Well, I guess most bands I listen to are gibberish.
The tune’s usually good though, but I can’t seem to hold onto it for very long.
Cellphone will not work properly in an emergency. Weird “Texts” come on the screen and I’m yelling at the damn thing.
Having relinquished my driver’s license due to injuries that limit my range-of-motion, I never drive anymore, but I always have dreams about getting in a car and harming somebody. Shifting into reverse in my dreams has instantly disastrous effects.
Playing a musical instrument in a dream, I find that I’m playing some bizarre hybrid of a guitar and bass.
I only know I’ve been dreaming when I wake up. I fall hook, line and sinker for the dreams every time. Which I’m grateful for, there’s some kind of strange consistency there that I appreciate.
Only in my dreams can I bluff my way through “reality.” As in, I can close my eyes and walk through walls because I can’t get the door to open.
Only in my dreams will I eat the foods I know give me bad reactiosn, and then suddenly become aware of it and worry about it.
Only in my dreams do I turn around and see a completely different scene than the one I just passed through. (My visual memory is crap.)
Only in dreams do my dead relatives turn out not to be dead. And I mean, yes, in the dream, I thought they were dead, and they come back. My grandma was even buried, but got out.
Oh, God, yes, I had that for a year after my father passed away. In my dreams, he came back! At first, he was kind of zombie like, but, with time, he got stronger and healthier and more dream-real. He spoke more. At first, he’d just come in to a room and sit there, but, after about a year, he would chat and laugh and even make mock of the idea that he might actually be dead. The dreams stopped being disturbing and started being reassuring, although in a weird way.
About that point, I guess my unconscious mind finally got the message, and those dreams ceased.
(Very, very selfishly, I sometimes hope I die before my sister does. I’m not prepared for those kinds of dreams about her.)
I’ll dream that I’m visiting my parents, and they’re still living in the house where we lived when I was a kid, even though in real life they’ve long since moved to a new and much nicer house. All the old furniture is even still there. In the dream I’m always angry at them, and I can’t understand why they’ve moved back the old house when they have the nice new one. For a while, I had this dream so often that I actually got confused even when awake about what house they actually lived in. I had to call them to check. I still have the dream now and then, though not so often anymore.
I can count on one hand the dreams I’ve had where I didn’t know I was dreaming. It’s just really obvious. I could list ways that dreams look, feel, and act different from reality, but really, I know I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming. It feels completely different.
I can float in the air, which is nice. I can’t fly high into the sky but I can jump and then float 50 feet or so until I get where I want to go.
Ironically when I do dream I’m doing this I never think ‘I must be dreaming’ I always think ‘how can I have lived this long and not realized I could do this’. So that alone doesn’t make me realize I’m asleep.
The only time I realized I was asleep, at least lately, was when I was looking into a mirror in my sleep.
I don’t really know how to answer the OP question, so can I reverse it in a way? I know that I’m not dreaming when my teeth start to crumble and fall out of my mouth, because these dreams always seem the most real. Flying dreams, dreams without clothing – I have these also but never experience the amazingly real emotions that my teeth dreams evoke.
If I get into a fight, and everything is a swing and a miss… I think “I spent WAY too much time studying martial arts to not be able to land a single shot, here…”
However, in general, no matter how weird things get in my dreams, it never occurs to me that I’m dreaming, even when I’m flying, or being chased like in a James Bond movie…
Yeah, that’s what I wanted to say. Do people actually think “Hey, I’m dreaming!” in the middle of dreams, and keep on dreaming? I’ve certainly awoken myself on purpose during a particularly bad dream, but I would think that if I ever realized I was dreaming, even pleasantly, I would wake up then also.
“Awoken?” Is that even a word and did I use it correctly??