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?