Yeah at first SP is pretty scary, even now there are times when I will wake up, or just become aware that I'm in a halfdream state and still get freaked out by it and force myself to wake up and move, though I'm always pissed afterwards because it's a blown oppurtunity to get into a lucid dream.

Sometimes it gets very freaky, let me know if this is how it feels for you? After some tingling, kinda like when an arm falls asleep, thru my whole body, I start to lose awareness of my body. At first it's like everything goes numb but then it's like it's not even there, its hard to describe because you lose every sense other than your mind. While this is going on Hypnagogic Imagery should be going off and you see (mostly it's not seeing visually but more a sense of things, again hard to describe cuz it's so ethereal sorta) colors, shapes and whatever I think of starts to visualize, For me it's very rapid fire and I'll see and feel myself in dozens of places and situations in a matter of seconds.

Eventually one of these 'hallucinations' takes hold and I can enter it and control myself in it. And then it's a dream. Most of the time for me I get into the bunch of images and feel my dream body and feel awake but don't lucidly enter a dream, just start a normal dream.

And recently I began sleep paralysis but as soon as I felt the strong vibration, tingling I had an OBE, and was almost instantly floating up above my bed. Very cool.

But, I've never entered a dream from just going to bed for the night, it only happens during naps or after first waking up in the middle of the night or morning. The best time to do it is when you wake up in the middle of the night or later in your sleep cycle. It takes me a few minutes (like 15 or so, I never look at a clock though, just guessing) from being awake to feeling the SP set in, then dreaming.

Just remember that when you feel SP to go with it and you can control it.