Immediately knowing you're dreaming without RC

[mcla]

Tonight something strange happened. I woke up and attempted to go back to sleep. I have been trying to dream about a certain scenario for a while now. When I fell asleep and entered a dream I immediately knew I was dreaming, as if it was obvious that just a second before I was awake. I never even thought about doing an RC and just went ahead with the dream, which went pretty close to the scenario I've been wanting to dream. I'm pretty new to lucid dreaming and am wondering what happened here. I have only been using DILD so far, but this always seems to involve having to suddenly realize that you are probably dreaming (e.g. by seeing something weird and dreamlike), which you would then ascertain by doing an RC. But this time I was immediately convinced 100% that I was dreaming without an obvious trigger. Was this something like a WILD? I then had one FA, then woke up for real and then it happened again. I went straight back to the same scenario, the dream lasted longer than the first time and was more vivid.

[dolphin]

This was a WILD. You remained conscious through the transition from waking to dreaming and this transition made you lucid. That's what a WILD is.

[TravisE]

A WILD is when you are fully conscious during the transition from awakening into sleep while being aware the entire time that this is what is happening. But it is also possible to have a “spontaneous” realization that one is dreaming without an obvious trigger without having an actual WILD (in this case, it is still technically a DILD). That can happen on occasion. For instance, I've had a few cases where I was sleeping lightly and suddenly happened to remember just after a dream started that I was just lying in bed and approaching sleep, thus becoming lucid without the need for any of the dream's content itself to remind me. It seems to me that mcla could be referring to either.

[mcla]

Thanks for your replies. I don't recall transitioning from waking to dreaming, so perhaps it was just such a spontaneous realization. I had the exact same experience last night, with a very brief lucid dream. I woke up and then deliberately tried to go back to sleep, with the intention to have a lucid dream. Suddenly, without any kind of transition, I was on a huge tarmac (the rest of the scenery wasn't really defined at first). A fireman ran past me and I shouted at him, asking him where the concert hall was. He didn't respond and halted at a huge structure, something that looked like a spacecraft. It had these huge, gray reflecting windows in the shape of alien eyes. That's where the dream faded. Again, right from the start I didn't question the fact that I was dreaming at all. Kind of like during the day, when you're not at all questioning whether you're awake. In any case, I'm going to keep trying to enter lucid dreams like this. Maybe at some point I'll notice some kind of transition.