It wasn't like that but I can see how that's the first conclusion you'd jump to

No, it was weeks of existence where I couldn't tell my dreams from my reality because they were identical. Every lucid dream of mine was so lucid I couldn't tell it from reality. And believe me, I tried. I tried to see discrepancies in the laws of physics, time, tracking several moving  objects at once, anything. No luck. The only way I could tell I was even dreaming was that sometimes I would do something like clean up or buy some food and put it in the fridge and then wake up to find out the food wasn't in the fridge or the floor was still dusty. That's how I knew I hadn't really cleaned up or gone to the shop. On top of that, my lucid dreams were constrained to normal laws of physics and the same rigid rules as this reality. I might have been able to affect a change if I had known when I was dreaming, but I never knew when I was dreaming and any time I tried to do something "impossible" I failed. I didn't try to jump from a great height or anything but I did try flying, quite stubbornly. I'm sure some of those times were within a dream. Landing on the living room floor on your stomach even from knee height kind of hurts. It hurt every time. Realistically. You guessed it: it didn't help me figure out if I was dreaming or not.  Now,  you might be thinking "but how could you know? After opening that fridge and discovering it was empty, surely you knew that that was the reality and the next dream would be the dream, right?" I wish it had been that simple. On top of everything else, I sometimes forgot I'd gone to sleep or woken up. I woke up and it the memory of it was wiped from my mind. Same with going to sleep (or going to sleep within a sleep. Or waking up within a dream. I don't know.) Sometimes I would wake up and go to sleep within a dream. This continued for weeks.

My dreaming was never like that before I tried (and succeeded at) lucid dreaming. All of that from forgetting when I'd woken up to waking up within a dream happened all at once and I couldn't stop it.

So that's my first and only experience with lucid dreaming  I'm ready to try again, but that really wasn't the most pleasant intro into lucid dreaming. It seems funny now but it didn't feel funny then!