Oh dang you sound like you're really really close to WILD!!

I remember last year I hit a snag when I got to the vibrations stage. So what I did was once I felt those vibrations and the images started to appear (like they did after you continued counting), I slowly opened my eyes after a couple seconds. I ended up seeing my room, but things were really off. So basically I had started the dream, so I just slowly got out of bed and did a couple RCs and boom! That confirmed it was a dream.

When I do it this way, it's easy to think I'm waking up for real and have an FA on accident, since the scene is usually my bedroom when I do this. But there will usually be something out of place, or you'll just "feel" that it's a dream. Especially since you're focused on it anyway.