Last night I had my first lucid dream in quite a while. I don't remember how I figured out I was dreaming, but I was in a distorted version of my house when it happened so something there probably didn't look right. What surprised me was how real it actually felt, despite fully knowing it wasn't. This was also the first time I could actually control the dream, something that's a bit harder than I thought it would be. For some reason if you want to "spawn in" objects, you can't just make them appear out of thin air. Instead you have to think about them and they'll appear somewhere outside your vision. I did this with my cat and she ran out from behind me. After that the dream environment started to collapse into nothingness, which is hard to describe, but I managed to stop it by focusing a lot. Still lucid, I decided to try making a person appear. After saying their name out loud multiple times, I walked into another room and they were standing right there. After that I woke up.
This one may have a bit mundane, but it was way more successful than my last lucid dream where I tried and failed to walk through a wall, then forced myself awake after accidently thinking about a monster which would have ended up starting a nightmare. Since I get sleep paralysis occasionally, I'm hoping that I can eventually figure out how to turn that into a lucid dream.