I was thinking about this yesterday, that maybe our dreams are exactly as vivid as real life while we’re having them?
Dreams often seem vague and indistinct when we wake up in the morning, but maybe that’s just because our memory of them isn’t very good?
You can feel the same about distant memories from the past - some of them will seem very fragmentary and “blurry” because we don’t remember much details, so maybe the same is true for dreams as well?
This would also explain why dreams suddenly start becoming more and more realistic when we start recording them - because that’s how we actually experience them during the dream scenes, and then we remember those details better?
From my experience, some lucid and even pre-lucid dreams can be as vivid as our waking. It depends on many factors such as the level of awareness in your sleep. If you want to stabilize your lucid dreams more for vividness and clarity, try these techniques: lucid-mind.com/controlling-dreams.html
I thought it was obvious… 
Not that I’ve heard this anywhere else before, but I came up with the idea on my own fairly easily.
I’ve had dreams more vivid than real life…where senses are all heightened more so than in real life. DR is the they key to gaining more realistic dreams.