Making the transition.

Ok, today was a very unintentional but very fruitful WILD exercise. I'm not even trying to LD at the moment but the experience was worthwhile.
I woke up today after about 7 hours of sleep. I feel refreshed so I get out of bed and make breakfast. I return to bed after about an hour because I have the day off and I feel sleepy again. I sleep on my back (I'm usually never able to) but before drifting off, I start having hypnagogic imagery and sounds. I make a mental note of that and decide to go for WILD since I'm already unintentionally halfway there. I start trying to imagine a dream scene but nothing materializes. The HI stops without me entering any dream. I open my eyes and go for a RC to a avoid the potential FA: no luck.
Somehow I drift back to sleep, and I start dreaming. I'm completely unaware until a sudden burst of logical thinking makes me lucid. The moment leading to the RC was surreal because of how real everything was. The dream was stable so I was over-confident. I lose it and wake up.
I'm lying down, and decide to go for another attempt at WILD (DEILD?). I achieve HI and HS very quickly. There are various very real sounds (didn't expect it to be this realistic). People talking, fire crackling and then out of nowhere a sound of man who's unintelligibly trying to what I assume to be guiding me through the experience! All of that stops and I'm yet again not able to get into a dream.
I was able to acknowledge the experience and set aside to focus on entering the dream (it's not the goal I know that) but I still wan't able to get into a dream. What went wrong?

I'm in a very similar place. My practice at the moment is working towards a WILD, letting the HG come and form a dream, with a little help from me. This morning I was imagining touching various objects in my bedroom - thia became a really vivid tactile HG where I was running my hands over my glass lampshade. Suddenly the lamp burst into light, and gave me a sharp electric shock in the palms of my hand - I woke up with them tingling. I really laughed! But although I continued to drift in and out of HG for a hour, never fell into REM sleep.

I'm glad to meet someone else who gets up and has breakfast and then goes back to bed. This is definitely my ideal WBTB sequence, no way I can get back to sleep without some food in me! I used to try the classic "5-6 hours", but I've realised that If I get less than 7 hrs sleep I just crash into very deep NREM, so no chance of a WILD; although on the other hand, more than 7 hrs and I can't get back to sleep at all. Maybe, you had had just a bit more sleep than you needed before your WBTB, and that's why you could only drift in and out of the HG ?

I found this WILD tutorial helpful:https://www.dreamviews.com/induction...d-secrets.html

From what i've read in your post, a lot of things went right for you. Congratulations.

To improve upon your attempts I would recommend you to ask yourself how calm and tired you felt during the experience. It might just be unlucky that your rem time was up, or it could be that you being 'too wakeful' in mind.

You will find out if you keep up this good practise!