How did this happen??

Quest for Lucidity
1

Last night I had one of the most vivid yet the most confusing LD’s I’ve ever had. It was most certainly a LD, but the thing is, I don’t know how I got lucid. I think I must have been lucid from the very beginning of the dream, because I can’t remember anything before it. All I remember is that I was standing on a bridge and yelled “I’M LUCID!” At that point, the dream still had an oddly 2D effect (like I was staring at a flat picture, but was somehow inside of it) and I could still slightly feel my closed eyelids. In attempt to add clarity to the dream, I looked around and focused on the details of my surroundings. At once everything snapped into full-fledged 3D. I was standing in what looked like Toronto, except for all the buildings were painted white with thick, bold black windows, balconies, and doors or vice versa. It was night time, the stars were twinkling and the streets were deserted. No cars, no people, nothing. There were no streetlights or signs, no logos and no lines painted on the roads.

As I observed this, I felt a thick blast of wind, and suddenly there was wind blowing from all directions, back and forth. It was so strong that the ground itself rocked as though it was a ship on stormy seas. The dream started slipping away, so I lunged and grabbed a railing. It felt solid beneath my hands and it anchored me to the dream. I let go and tried to walk, but fell to my knees on the rocking pavement. In my mind I screamed, “STOP MOVING!” and everything shuddered to only small, light rocking motions. But it was too much for me to hold with my mind, so I let the wind back in and stood up.

More happened after that, but I’m not going to waste time explaining it. After I woke up, I felt that energized feeling I always get after a LD and could remember the dream like it actually happened. The point is that it was an actually LD, but I have no idea how it happened. In the dream, there was no moment of ‘realization’, no RC, and no DS. It was simply a fact from the beginning. It was just something I knew, the same way that I know my name. When it began, i wasn’t that lucid, only enough to vaguely know it was a dream, and as I stabilized I slowly increased in lucidity. It’s weird because that’s never happened to me before. Why did it happen? Has it ever happened to anyone else?

Oh, and I did wake up before the dream. I woke up at around 5:45 - 6:00 and fell back asleep, and woke up at 6:25 afterwards. Could the fact that I was awake before have something to do with it?

2

Don’t worry, it’s nothing weird. It’s called spontaneous lucidity, where you become lucid for no apparent reason. That always happens to me. In fact, I’ve had no lucid dreams whatsoever where I DIDN’T become lucid spontaneously.

It’s improbable that you were lucid from the start, you probably just gained lucidity randomly at the moment you shouted that, so no, I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that you had awoken briefly.

3

To answer your last question, waking up before your usual waking period, then falling back asleep is a good way to decrease your recall if you don’t write your dreams down, but also a good way to achieve lucidity. Because your body has already rested itself immensely, you don’t have as heavy alpha-wave periods, if any at all, depending on how long you sleep after you woke up the first time (alpha-wave periods are the state of mind your brain is in when in incredibly deep sleep, inhibiting focus in dreams and even disallowing you to have dreams).