I will be the first to say that I encounter some routinely bad stuff in my dreams, frequent lucid dreamer or not. If it is a good day to sleep, nothing happens. If it is a decent day, I get some dreams that I have control over or have some sort of insightful meaning to me. If it is a bad day?

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You start to realize how desensitized you have become when what are regularly considered nightmares leave you with only a few hours of bad sleep and a pretty cold, unemotional feeling when you get up. To be to the point without being too graphic, a lot of them are reliving events or recompiling them into newer and more unsettling realities. There's some deepseated insecurities I have with people that I have been working on and through for my entire lifetime that have only been made worse - we are talking to the point that I am pretty convinced when I go outside every day I am about to get picked off - but they are even more disturbing in dreams where your mind runs rampant without regular inhibitions.

Usually they turn from whatever seems to be a normal day, sometimes days I have lived before or ones that mirror life today, into disaster. This alone is pretty scary because if I am not aware, there's almost no easy indicator that this is not my life and is a fabrication of the mind. They follow patterns of involving people I distrust and for one reason or another we are forced into some sort of working scenario where they just cannot be uninvolved for whatever reason. Other times they are just faceless, nameless people. End result doesn't change. Somewhere along the line, usually in a city or confined environment, there starts up an exchange and my "own people" turn against me. Usually I am able to fend them off, withdraw, shoot - rinse, repeat. Sometimes it gets savage, other times it stays "neat" like that.

It is a bad feeling, I am not really sure what you can describe it as, other than you "know" what it feels like to be hunted. It is a lot worse when you knew, know or even regularly see these people and have to try to not think that, or not think you "killed" them in a dream or that you distrust them so much as individuals that they act as stand-ins. You can't un-see it. Other times you get glimpses back to them when you are going about life and you just time travel to another mindset and place, leaving everyone else looking at you and wondering where you went. It's cliché, I know, but it is a real thing.
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But that isn't always the case. Sometimes other than finally catching up on sleep, I have the pleasure of getting to lucid dream. I make a pretty strong effort to double check reality, as the above compels me to, but when things do not align and I can tell it? What I would give to make those last longer. For myself the easiest way is to check the time, yet even that's hard to do. What I tend to notice is just strange inconsistencies.

For one, if I am not [i]really[/i] me. If I am some other identity and my immediately recognizable dream qualities aren't manifest, something is off. That sounds backwards, but believe me, it is a lot more strange to be someone else in a dream and then have to think about returning to your own dream existence after. Other times it is when physics are off or the behavior of people are not aligning correctly with what I know to be true. Sometimes its the damn mist or haze, which is in places it shouldn't be - like indoors. That's when the limits are off. These I will share in time to come, because who does not want interesting or fascinating dreams?

Responding in turn to [@Shoryu Magami], I have a similar but different experience with my writing. In the rare circumstances I have a decent dream and I do encounter some of my own works, I cannot influence them or alter them at all. The identities of these select few individuals I have no power over. It's bizarre in that sense, because otherwise these dreams are completely lucid and malleable as well as subject to recall. Involving them? Information gets lost, I cannot exercise anything on them directly and the conversations tend to be surprisingly informative and satisfying, even if I could tell you nothing about them.