I am an extremely active and vivid dreamer. I seem to dream excessively and remember everything in extreme detail. I talked to my doctor about this and he suggested that if I’m that active, I might as well do something useful with it, so he suggested pursuing LD.
I’ve read enough to know how to begin down the path. But I’m not sure I want to open Pandora’s box just yet. My hesitation is over just what happens when I “wake up”. The worst thing about excessive dreaming (for me) is remembering all the things I went through overnight–all the experiences I had when I really wasn’t myself.
My dream self has limited knowledge and makes different decisions than I would. I can remember everything that “I” did all night long, but don’t feel like I had any say in it at all. It’s more like somebody else’s experiences were poured into my brain.
Last night I walked into my high school classroom filled with friends and coworkers from every place I’ve lived at every stage of my life. That’s enough to trigger a reality check. But if I had realized I was dreaming, how much of my real life would have come back to my awareness?
Would I have realized that I am actually 40 years old, that I live in Alaska, that it’s December 2007, and that I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow afternoon? Would all the knowledge of who I am, where I’ve been, and what I know be available to me? Or would I have remained in my high school frame of mind and just said, “Cool, I’m asleep. I’m going to fly!”
Would I really “wake up” in a lucid dream and truly be my real-time self and then decide what I want to do? Or would my dream self simply realize that he is in a dream, and act according to his own desires, leaving me to remember what he did when morning comes?
If it’s the latter, then LD really doesn’t help me. It only changes the nature of what happens during the dream. I remember more about what I did during my dream last night than I do about my high school graduation. Yet my graduation feels more real because I know it was me, and I had control over my actions the entire time. Last night’s dream is still sharp and detailed in my mind, but it’s more like remembering a play that I was in, following a script that was written by someone else.
I hope this makes sense to some of you. I am very interested to hear what it feels like when you attain lucidity, and how much awareness you have of your current life. Are you really fully self-aware and able to do anything you want, even if it were something mundane like planning a trip to the grocery store or solving a riddle you heard that morning?
When you first start LD’ing, you may have low level LD’s where it is just like you ND’s except that you know that you are dreaming, but don’t have full consciouness of your current life. It could also happen that you have full consciouness of your current life, and wake up. 
With practice you should be able to have full consciouness of yourself, and control over the dream. Just read some of the DD’s here and you can see how different it is for everyone.
With practice, you can get it to wake up and go back to work in your LD’s, so don’t worry about not being yourself.
imo