REM atonia stopping early?

Hello everyone,

First, I apologize if this is the wrong place to put this post. I'm new (this being my second post) and I'm still learning the layout of this message board.

An odd phenomenon occurs whenever I do any kind of dream work for any extent, even sometimes just a couple of days. Sometimes I'll sit up in bed and overlay the dream on my physical perceptions, and my mind will still be dreaming while I interact with the shadows of dreams imprinted around me. For instance, I'll often sit up and start talking to a figure I'm baffled that I can't quite see anymore. Once I sat up and announced to my wife, "I have an idea!" and promptly flung myself off the top bunk we were in that night; I didn't really wake up until I had crashed against the floor and bruised my legs and torso enough to create welts the next day.

This appears to be genetic. My father once woke my mother up by standing on the bed and pushing against the wall, insisting that she needed to get out of bed before the wall falls down. My sister used to sleepwalk, which I assume is a similar phenomenon (although I honestly don't know; my sister would rarely remember her sleepwalking episodes whereas I, to my infinite embarrassment, usually had complete memory of my waking-dreaming episodes and knew exactly how absurd I looked and sounded afterwards).

This generally isn't a problem per se, excusing the episode of me throwing myself off a bunk bed. But it is odd to me since I was always under the impression that REM atonia was supposed to prevent this sort of thing from happening. My best current theory as to why this is going on is that my REM atonia just stops early and it takes a minute for my mind to wake up and realize what's going on.

(Incidentally, this has never happened while I've been in a lucid dream. The closest is that sometimes I would yell in a lucid dream and my physical body would yell. If I open my physical eyes during a lucid dream, I'm fully awake - or at least as far as I know!)

Does anyone have deeper insight into this phenomenon? I doubt it indicates a medical problem since I've had this all my life, as have my father and sister, and it is correlated with dream work (i.e. attempts to improve dream recall and become lucid). However, it might mean I have, say, a genetic predisposition to being deficient in some nutrient.

Any ideas?

Oh, and if this question has been posted elsewhere and already answered, I apologize. I had no idea how to search for it!