I'm pretty sure I had my second LD last night.

I didn’t consciously try to use any techniques, and I hadn’t thought about lucid dreaming for a while. I think I fell asleep around 2am. I was pretty exhausted, and very soon after falling asleep, I found myself in a part of my house besides my bed (I think I was sitting). It seemed completely normal for a while (as in, I thought I was supposed to be there). I’m not sure when I gained lucidity, but I remember that I was pretty calm about the whole thing. I recall accidentally beginning to float, so I tried floating around the room for a while. I don’t seem to remember much else, except that I felt like it was truly real life (but at the same time, I knew it wasn’t). I couldn’t do super amazing things, so I got bored (felt like it lasted a long time) and consciously tried to wake up. I opened my eyes in real life and saw that the time was 2:36am. Oh right, I was never in a non-lucid state during my dream (at least, I believe so).

Last time, someone told me that my LD may have been HI, because apparently you’re not supposed to dream that fast. About half an hour passed between falling asleep and waking up then, too. That dream was much shorter, and it passed through three different images (all in my room…the first was me in bed, dark surroundings, the second was me in bed, people standing all around me whispering about me, the third was me waking up in my sunlit room, except it was really clean (no books on shelves and stuff), and the floor was grass…I gained lucidity in the third version of the room, but my dream faded a few seconds after I realized it was a dream).

I think I may have had HI two or three times in the past few weeks, where I see an normal image (maybe my desk or something, some part of my room) in my head after perhaps 5-10 minutes of sleep, and attempting to interact with a stapler or something causes the image to fade into black, and also a fuzzy feeling. I seem to get this when I fall asleep with the lights still turned on and I was in the middle of doing something but got too tired.

Any thoughts or theories?

[edit: Huh. Was I unintentionally using WILD? I just read about it, and I didn’t consciously do anything listed.]

I don’t think it was WILD cause you have to enter consciously a dream, what you didn’t do. But of course, it was a LD and not HI. When you see HI, they are in front of your eyes, like a movie. You generally can’t act or change the HI. When you experience a LD, you are moving and are surrounded by the dream. So it’s easy to make the difference.

What we know about sleep phases is just statistic. When you are very tired, or when you don’t have a regular sleep schedule, they may be modified. These last nights, I have had very long dreams in the very first hours of sleep.

Perhaps it was something like a “hypnagogic dream”. I experience this quite often. It isn’t a real dream, since I’m still half awake, but’s more than just hypnagogic imaginery, because you CAN interact with those “surroundings” to some extend. If you become lucid or interact too much, the scene vanishes abruptly.

Im pretty sure almost everybody knows this phenomenon. It’s similar to this experiences when you begin to fall asleep, but awake suddenly a few minutes later because of some kind of “shock”, which is also integrated in that “hypnagogic dream” (but I think the dream does not cause the shock, even though it might seem like it would, but the dream incorporates the shock, which comes from somewhere else, perhaps some “short circuit in your brain” :eek: )

We talked about that on another forum. But not everybody has this. For instance, I haven’t. In these dreams, you suddenly fall, or you are surprised by something and wake up suddenly. I agree with you when you say that the dream incorporates a shock from somewhere. In my opinion, it incorporates what is called a “myoclonic jerk” (just when falling asleep, your body has a jerk and you wake up. It’s often associated with the classical WILD falling feeling.).

I think I gradually came back to reality rather than abrubtly. I think I felt like I was neither in my dream nor in reality for a few seconds, though, kind of like how OOB is described. Felt slightly scared at that point.