Yeah, me too. Hearing voices, talking back, and interacting with characters in dreams as if they were in my waking life is pretty normal and nothing I worry about. Whether I was taking drugs or not, when I was a child and even before I took drugs, I experienced similar things in waking dreams.
I mean to research this more because I think it's really interesting. Dreams are fascinating and powerful. I seem to have a very thin membrane separating my waking consciousness from my dream subconscious. It's always been easy for me to slip into a lucid dreaming state and I think that may be related to the ease with which I sink into half-waking/half-sleeping states on opiates.
But I definitely think what the OP describes is normal for many people and I don't consider it a cause for alarm. In other words, OP and other previous posters, you're not at all crazy.
You just have a really immediate connection to your dream states.
Top Cat: Thanks for your posts. Some interesting info in there, especially the definition of "Hypnic Jerks." I've often wondered what the correct term was for those occurrences.
I have experienced the Tetris effect many times and now I have a name for it. Most people have probably experienced it after studying for hours on end or working repetitive retail gigs. Or working as a production artist or animator. I worked in a Tower Video and our last duty of the night was re-shelving cases of the returned movies before we closed the store. I have some crystal-clear memories of bolting up in bed out of dreams where I was shelving dozens of identical VHS tape cases in rapid sequence. Usually Blue Velvet. Night after night.
Coiling audio cables… I worked as a sound tech and the last thing we'd do before going home was coiling and hanging up dozens of XLR, RCA and power cables before we could clock out. Once I jumped out of bed, convinced that we'd left a load of cables up at the Greek and was in the car before I got back to reality. Sleep deprivation and drugs seem to create the same effect. Ironically, they're very fond memories.