I don't know if you are into meditation or not, however, there is a technique that has been used for dreams, to "know" when you are dreaming.
Not saying this technique is easy to develop, but :
During meditation sessions, you create your own symbol. Something that is easily remembered, and you commit it to memory as a marker of sorts to appear "in" your dreams to signal you that you indeed are in a dream.
This technique is to awaken your conscious awareness, and assume control of the dream, once you see your own "dream" symbol.
IF you are able, then next time you have one of these continuing dreams, and have developed this technique as workable, you can consciously ask questions, and/or alter the events of the dream.
Relative to something you wrote in a previous post : The crystaline appearance of what you have termed as angels.
Can't say when this particular dream was...( Rainman might know, since I told him about it right after it happened. ) ...
In this dream I was within a Pillar of Light. Standing inside the base, and looking upwards, I could see a spiral staircase circling up towards the top of the Pillar, along the stone walls.
The walls were seemingly solid, but not. Everything within the pillar seemed to glow with a white aura. There were platforms along the length of the staircase, and at each platform there was a stained-glass window.
I walked to the first platform and looked at the window there.
It had an image of a man dressed in robes, the overcoat/robe was blue, and the garmet visible underneath was silver. He had silver hair, and was wearing a golden crown. His hands were held before him, as though he would be holding a basketball in front of him. There was a crystal sphere floating between his hands, and inside the sphere was two opposing tetrahedrons.
He did have a crystaline appearance, but, being an image within a stained glass window, guess that helps with that attribute.
From seeing the intense light outside, and the way the structure glowed, in my dream, I realized that the light outside, and the structure were one and the same, however, the walls and staircase were somehow solidified within this pillar of light.
This dream also is a continuing dream. Although, it has been awhile since there has been another...at first I couldn't see the upper sections of the pillar, but in following dreams, eventually was able to see that the staircase vanished into an illuminated golden haze cloudy type mist.