Had a semi-lucid. Also question

Popcorn Festival/Bodyguard - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

Also I remembered some stuff that was happening when I fell asleep. I took 5-HTP before bed hoping to take advantage of REM rebound. I was focusing on maintaining my consciousness and setting my imagined dreamland scape. I was deeply relaxed and then images started appearing in front of me.

There was an weird symbol for one. Then I was sitting at the head of the table with a bunch of people looking at me. It was really colourful and bright but yet overlaid over blackness at the same time.

Since that was at the start of the night about 5 minutes in. I can conclude that it was not REM. It is also the same feeling as those experiences when I am awake in the middle of the night. So I must be unconscious during the true REM sleep.

It's strange because I have had extremely vivid dreams before that my senses cannot tell the difference between it and real life. But most of experiences thus far seem to be less vivid.

Anyone else have this?

Don't know about 5-HTP, etc. But dreams, even lucids, at the beginning of sleep are sometimes possible to achieve. Not sure what happens in the brain, maybe it's forced to go into REM like during daytime naps? Either way these are very rare (at least for me), but I had some of these. The best one happened when I was about 16 years old (when I was really good at LDing, a level I try to reach now...):

So basically I went to sleep 1/2 hour early, and did a VILD (visualizing a scene until it becomes a dream). Remained calm, and visualized it over and over again until it started going... In this lucid, I was a super hero in a vacation house with his super heroine girlfriend on a planet we owned (that whole universe was reoccurring for me back then, but we never had a vacation so that's what I decided to visualize ;) ). The lucid was very vivid and detailed, and in plot lasted about a day or two, but without jump cuts and false memories must have been about 30 minutes long... Either way, I lost lucidity after that, during a walk to the woods and saw a tunnel and went to investigate it. There I met some unknown super bad guy, he was like a shadow of some sort... I ran up the tunnel, but it caught my leg and started dragging me down into nowhere. When I woke up, I was still feeling like something is pulling me off the bed, and kept sliding off (not for real - but that's what I thought) and I couldn't move, and the lights started flicker... Anyway, that was my first real SP, apparently... :P

About vividness - early dreams (happening early in sleep) are usually less vivid, less lifelike and shorter. However, your awareness in them is going to be lower as well - so this is how you can miss something that is less lifelike. Late dreams (occurring closer to the end of sleep) are usually more realistic and vivid, so despite having more awareness during these hours, you might miss them due to their higher realism... This is why we practice awareness, RCs and recall - since for most people by default the dreaming mind is not aware enough to get lucid. Lucidity, vividness, etc., fluctuate pretty wildly - so to increase general vividness for example, recall and stable sleep routine are probably what you need to practice. But this doesn't mean that you won't have any non-vivid dream, it will only increase the amount of the vivid ones.