so im laying in bed for a while, i cant go to sleep. after lying for an hour i notice that the time is 1:10. next thing i know i am asleep and having a vivid dream which ends in a column of water knocking out the bridge in front of my car and me falling in slow motion to the water and waking up. i wake up in SP and i attempt to reenter the dream but unfortunately cannot. nontheless, i look at the clock and it says 1:45!
any comments on this strange happening would be appreciated
I’ve seen such an account very recently on the forum. I can’t find it back again. 
I think dreams can occur in all phases of sleep, so you may have managed to get one in NREM.
there’s no absolute rule on when you can and can’t have dreams.
if I do dream in the first REM, within 30 minutes to 3 hours of falling asleep, those are usually actually my most interesting dreams, and they tend to wake me up completely leaving me to ponder what just happened.
though that pattern has broken quite a bit, 4-5 months ago i was having really wacky dreams in the first REM or possibly non-REM sleep right when I went to bed.
generally not lucid though, but sometimes.
i really like them a lot though because they seem “deeper” than morning dreams.
Actually one of my fastest LD-s happened within 30 minutes after going to sleep at night. I know it, because my pc goes blank after 30 minutes of inactivity, and it was still on, when i woke up from the dream.
My personal record is 2 hours after going to sleep. The dream was a really vivid (and scary) entrails kind (teeth or organs falling out, skin peeling off), but not exactly a nightmare.
I always dream early in the night, usually within the first 30 minutes of falling asleep (and I fall asleep fast, too). Nine times out of ten, my first dream of the night, if I remember it, will be a bad/strange dream. I wouldn’t say a nightmare because I really don’t have any dreams that are terrifying anymore since I started coming to this forum, but usually they involve something bad happening like some bad person chasing me or a general feeling of uneasiness, stuff like that. Those early, non-REM dreams usually don’t make a heck of a lot of sense, either.
I have read recently i think about this, that the first nREM sleep can host vivid dreams. They said it in connection with OBE’s. It makes sense to me that an vivid nREM dream could be so qualitatively different from rem dreams that an lucid dreamer might think “this is not like dreaming” while it’s happening.
Makes me wonder what differences there are and if they host other possibilities than a lucid REM dream.
The difficulty with this is, if you don’t have a EEG at home (and it’s rather uncommon 
) you can’t know if you have Sleep Onset REM or rather early REM stages or if you have vivid dreams during n-REM stages…