Catching REM/Cycles?

So I was having a bit of a dry spell. I had another long flight that lasted from Saturday until Sunday morning, and I didn't actually go to bed until around 10:30 am on Sunday. Before that I hadn't slept a whole night since Friday night.

I woke up at 5 pm to eat dinner and just relax a bit. I went back to sleep around 12 am. I listened to hemi sync while I was doing it. Usually when I'm very tired (As I generally deprive myself of a full eight hours of sleep after flights because I have to stay on the same schedule), I see some lucidity and sometimes AP success while listening to the aids, but not always. It's often really wild and uncontrolled, but I'm aware of things happening.

This time it wasn't like that. The first six lucid dreams I had were a part of a DEILD chain. I remember from the last time I had a DEILD that I was to try my best not to move, and I didn't until I took my headphones off.

But then after that, I would say around 5:30-6:30 A.M. I had another lucid dream. I felt this wave that progressively went into my back. As I felt it coming I just froze to let it do what it wanted. Then I was in dream. The crazy thing is I wasn't wearing ear plugs as I normally do, and my roommate was busy moving in and out of the room constantly. He still woke me up, but I was in the dream for over an hour and he might have been in an out of our room.

It seems like my body naturally caught itself in the right moment for the second one. The only thing I felt that was out of the ordinary was sleeping a whole night just seven hours after I had slept previously. Does anyone have any techniques on how to catch these moments or a guide? Before I had something similar and I felt it was almost like a CAT, but this time my full night of sleep happened at a normal hour. It seems catching those times is a great way to become lucid. I did repeat the mantra "Mind awake, body asleep" in my head a bunch of times, but I do that every night.

Hmm I'm not really sure how you would reproduce this. Perhaps the anticipation of your flight led you to be more aware in your sleep.

I personally believe it's the timing. I was of course really tired, but instead of my usual going to bed in the morning: I went almost in the afternoon. I just wish I had some way of figuring out what is an ideal time for me without killing my sleep cycles.