First Encounter With Sleep Paralysis. Can Anyone With Experience Help?

I think I may have just realized that I have the opportunity to DEILD every morning. I'll explain what happened and I want to know if someone can explain if it was real and where I can go from there.

Every morning I wake up and passively leave my eyes closed several times, once after each dream. This probably happens 2/3 times a morning. Each time I feel very close to sleep, as if I just left my dream. I have weird feelings in parts of my bodies as if they are going numb or something, I can't really explain it. But this usually creeps me out as I am a bit scared of sleep paralysis. Just yesterday I said to myself, "hey wait if this gets me paralyzed I can use it to lucid dream!" Which is why today I decided to take it further. And holy crap after about just 10-20 seconds I felt that blanket everyone's been talking about, and it's heavy! I only felt it on my lower body (abs, pelvis,) but it was heavy and I felt my body sinking into the bed. I decided that was enough and decided to lift my fingers a bit (my way of checking if I'm paralyzed and getting out of it,) and then I got up.

This just happened 15 minutes ago but it still seems hazy to me. I think it's because I just came out of a dream before doing it. It's almost dream-like but this happens every morning and the feelings don't really change. So someone tell me, does this sound right? Also I have two questions for if it is real:

1- This is in the morning, it's not during deep REM periods, so my dreams are short and blurry. If I decided to use this to get into a lucid dream would it last more than 20 seconds?

2- Where do I go from SP? I will go further each day with this, tomorrow hopefully getting my entire body paralyzed. This all happened very fast and I didn't have time to think to do anything else.

You are extemely close, just persist with the SP and continue to imagine the last minute of your previous dream. If it fails you will not notice because you will just fall asleep, fortunately you nearly always have a lucid dream using Deild. I found that rem periods do not matter that much because unless you wake up from an extremely deep sleep the rem will come along with the sleep paralysis. :)

BTW in the morning you have the deepest and longest REM sleep.

Thanks, I'm going to try going further tomorrow. By the way, since I only felt the 'lead blanket' on my lower body, what happens to the rest of my body? Will it come again or will I be asleep quickly?

Your whole body will be completely paralyzed and you will probably not be able to move your finger but at this point you have basically already entered the dream. The process only takes around a minute once you become quick at inducing SP.

If you are scared of sleep paralysis, you can skip it. Instead of focusing on your body, lying in bed, focus on an imaginary dream scene with an imaginary dream body. You can use the most recent dream you remember, a totally new scene, or an easy memory from your real life. Just pick whatever jumps into your brain first. The most important thing to do is to engage the visualization. Imagine your dream body moving, touching, and interacting with the environment.