The good news is that I do make progress, I do learn, I do get farther, even though it only seems like a millimeter at a time. This is the most active it gets, and it is quite subtle. There is more energy in reading a word than there is in some of these activities. The whole thing is so very, very, subtle. While it is true that within a lucid dream I've made cars appear or walked through walls or flew within the context of THAT dream I could not really change that much without changing the whole nature of the dream, its whole character, frequently disrupting the whole thing and ending it.
Dreams also seem to have a natural life cycle, a natural time to live before they want to wind down.
I see post after post of people wanting to extend the length of the experiences, and my own experiences correlate that dreams want to end and its hard to fight that. Frequently when I'm lucid I can end up feeling like the dream that I was in was spent and had run its course and was no longer any fun. During the subtleties of transitions dreams present themselves at a pretty early stage, although they aren't dreams in the way that we think of them. They are sort of nodules at first, shapes which have a mental feel about them, occupying a space which is perceived but not seen. In other words, shapes that are felt but for which there is not a specific visual.