Was I lucid dreaming?

[blacklex]

This is what I put in my dream journal this morning :) I believe we were going o get dinner in the city down the hill. We were going to get spaghetti. Then, out of no where, I asked "Am I dreaming" then everything went black. I started yelling out "Hello?! Hello?!". Then when I stopped yelling that out, I may or may not have seen a face, this I can't remember very well. I tried to create a scene like a city but I could not, it was hard. I could not even move! Then I decided to wake up. I could still feel my real body somehow, it was tingling and I knew I could move it at any time but it felt different, like it was heave and just stuck in place. I got up and t was only 30 minutes after I had went to sleep. Is it possible that I had accidentally tried another method rather than DILD without even knowing? Also, is this normal and is lucid dreaming supposed to be hard? I only started trying about 3 days ago so might be because I am a beginner. Thanks in advanced!

[Oreo]

This most likely was a lucid dream. A lucid dream is simply any dream where at some point you become aware that you're in a dream. I'm assuming this was the case since you were able to make the decision to wake up. What you experienced after waking up was sleep paralysis. I've found it to be common after you force yourself awake. Lucid dreaming isn't exactly supposed to be easy or hard. Like most skills there will be people who find it to be easy and learn quickly. However, there are other people who struggle with it and find lucid dreaming to be very difficult. It seems that you might be one of the people who will learn quickly.

[blacklex]

This is the main question I have, is it weird that I had the dream only 30 minutes in?

[Darkmatters]

What I'm finding more and more is that you can't rely on the science to be accurate all the time. Supposedly you don't go into REM for 90 minutes, but I've heard many people say they fall asleep for just 5 minutes and have a REM dream, and it's happened to me a few times. I've also taken 5-HTP which is supposed to supress REM for a few hours, woke up in an hour or so, and remember dreams. All it means is that the sceience is just genralizations and that nobody actually conforms exactly to it. Also, a lot of people have 'beginner's luck' when they first discover what Lucid Dreaming is and start having them immediately. Lucky bastards.

[blacklex]

xDD Don't feel that upset about my luck, it was not too exciting or a dream as you can see, it was quite boring xD

[Scionox]

Congrats on lucid dream, even if it was short, it's an first step to feel it! My first lucid dream was really short as well, and i got it pretty fast. Whether lucid dreaming is hard or not really varies from person to person, especially considering that i got my first lucid dream from WILD which most of people find to be hardest method ever, and that i have not had much luck with DILDs(only 2 so far out of all of my lucids). As for the time question, i use WILD naps so i often get into the dream immediately, it is not at all weird to have the period before starts dream shorter, at least from my personal viewpoint.

[Sensei]

Hard to say about whether it was lucid. Probably, but if not, you were ridiculously close. So congrats! Any dream in which you become lucid, it is a DILD. Simply reading about LDing can often cause lucid dreams. I was concentrating purely on recall when reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreams by Stephen Laberge and had LDs from that. Sometimes people just become lucid. I simply "became" lucid 10 times before I even knew what it was when I was younger. Good luck.