Newbie here - What just happened?

Hey guys-
I've been lurking around here for a week and a half to two weeks. During this time I've been completely infatuated with lucid dreaming (having never done one myself). I started reading LaBerge's book, keeping my dream journal, and doing reality checks religiously. So far, no lucid dreams (not that I was expecting one yet), but dream recall is up to 1-2 every night.

Anyways, I just laid down to try to WILD (I know I'm probably too inexperienced to succeed) for about an hour. I got extremely relaxed and unsure if I ever reached SP. I seemed to forget about my body's sensations and "get lost in my own head". I started seeing random things/random scenes as if a dream was trying to start, but after about 3 seconds for each one, my eyes felt like they'd roll into the back of my head (kindof a strain) and I snapped back to realizing I was back in my bed/definitely not in a dream. This just repeated itself (going in/snapping back out) repeatedly for a while til I just got tired of it and went to bed.

Besides the point I had a super vivid dream when I just went to sleep and remembered almost all of it (couple pages in DJ). But my real question is, how close to a WILD was I? Was I just falling asleep (non-lucidly) and snapping back out of it? Was my experience typical? If so, how do I "break through" into an actual dream?

Thanks a lot in advance - I appreciate it.

Its almost impossible I believe to have a WILD before a sleep cycle (correct me if I am wrong) you cant just lie down and go into SP and then have an LD because your first REM cycle is very short and weak so if you did manage to do this you would end up in a really crappy dream. It is best to WILD when you have been sleeping for a good 5-6 hours (i.e. weekend mornings) and you are already relaxed and can slip into SP very easily (in theory dosent really work for me :P) as for breaking through I believe it takes practise, everyone is different and thus getting into SP and hence a Lucid dream is generally going to be different for everyone, for instance some people do reptitive things to maintain consiousness. i.e. couinting whilst others find this makes it impossible to fall asleep and only maintain a tiny bit of conciousness, experiment practise you'll eventually get there :)

It was a decently long nap - not my sleep for the night (which I thought you could WILD off of) and I most definitely dreamt, though it was after I changed positions and gave up on trying to maintain awareness.

Im really unsure of what was happening when it felt like I was teetering into visualizations/dreams but almost painfully (with eyes rolling back into my head feeling) snapping out repeatedly