Gambling My Sanity (Not really a nightmare, not really a dream either.)

Last night I had one of those extended nested-dream sequences where I kept “waking up” into another dream over and over. The whole thing felt structured in a way my usual dreams aren’t.
Before I even fully fell asleep I could still create images perfectly in my head. Screens were glowing, everything looked sharp. Then I noticed I couldn’t read, letters started generating into symbols that are letter-like but don't exist, almost identical to how early generations of ai used to generate videos with text in them. I immediately knew why, because it was in my mind (which I knew from reading somewhere, but it's weird that I was able to retrace that information in live time). After that I got tired of fighting the sleep and actually went under. Once I was asleep, the main premise of the whole sequence was that I was gambling on how long I could move through the dreamscape without losing my sanity, for a payout. Literally. Every time I “woke up” I was back in the same physical position I fell asleep in, with a new random scenario playing out with the occasional random scenery/ background.
Here's those scenes:
• Woke up in a bouncy castle that was somehow also a baseball game. Met a naked old Black guy who was kind of a creep at first but ended up being a chiller, had a toy gun, there was a naked woman too. They started masturbating together so I left them alone and woke up.
• Felt my stomach tickling. Dreamed I was on vacation holding my friend’s dog against my stomach, felt something weird, looked down and it was a sea slug riding between me and the dog. My mom picks it up and it turns out to just be a sea turtle with a weird slimy suction cup underside. Wake up.
• See my dad in the apartment I’m staying at (sleeping over my friend’s place) after he just used the bathroom. Impossible because he doesn’t know my friend, but he’s just “visiting.” We talk like it’s normal. Wake up.
• Random apartment. Pitch black. The only light source is my phone and very faint light from windows. Look down at my phone on a gambling app (except the gamble was with me), and I hear a voice say “how long do you think you can go before losing your sanity?” Wake up.
• See my friend’s little sister walking around the apartment and my friend coming out of the bathroom at the same time. Think “oh I’m finally up,” then look next to me and there’s some random person sleeping there. Realize I'm dreaming. Wake up for real this time. Stomach is still tickling. When I actually woke up for real, I knew immediately it was the real one. No residual doubt. What stuck with me is that I feel like I subconsciously knew I was dreaming the whole time. That narrator voice and the overarching “sanity bet” frame wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Some part of me was tracking it the entire way through. I’ve always had pretty strong meta-awareness, and this felt like a clear example of it still running even while I was deep in the dream layers. Curious if anyone else has had long nested sequences that felt this deliberately structured. What does this say about how my brain works?