This is common, I think, or at least I've seen other people discuss it before ( http://adamcadre.livejournal.com/172934.html ), and it fits my own experience as well. From which I had the rather obvious-in-hindsight insight that the experience of knowledge is itself just another sort of experience, just another type of qualia, just like color or sound. In dreams knowledge doesn't need to have an origin-via-discovery, same way that dream images don't need to originate in our eyes, and dream sounds don't need to originate in vibrations of our ear drums...

(nods) Me too. I've also had the RPG-esque variation where I've had a split awareness of the dream... I am aware of the broader narrative context, but I am also experiencing being a character in the narrative who is not aware. E.g., I know that there's something interesting behind that door, and I'm walking around the room, but I can't just go and open that door because I don't actually know that in my walking-around-the-room capacity.