Astral projection and lucid dreaming at the same time?

[Kayak]

I'm sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong category.

About a year ago I was on a long-distance hike and found myself staying at a bunkhouse a mile from the trail.  That night, I got the whole place to myself, until about 3:30 in the morning when some hikers arrived late and woke me up.  One of them began snoring extremely loud, and it frustrated me so much that I grabbed my sleeping bag and crashed out on the front porch.  I went to sleep and began dreaming.  I was on a some kind of vessel/ship and I don't know if I was in space or what, but I felt this huge dark, empty space all around me.  I couldn't tell If the vessel was moving up or down, but it was moving very fast and I felt anxious about where it was going.  Suddenly, for the first time in my life my dream turned lucid, I was fully aware that I was dreaming.  When I became aware, i was no longer on the ship; I don't remember where I was.  I remember thinking to myself that the possibilities are endless, I can dream about anything I want to!  This though frightened me and began to feel anxious.  Before waking up, I told myself, "I want to see my hand, ii want to see what they look like".  So I started moving my hands in front of my face but it felt as if they were attached to my body by a bungie cord.  I remember they looked like my normal hands, but at the same time there was a surreal quality to them, almost like a CGI/video game quality, and they were slightly illuminated and making a buzzing sound.  At this point my anxiety was through the roof and I began to wake up?  One of my eyes was open and the other one was closed.  I could see half reality and half dream at the same time.  I could also hear half reality and half dream at the same time and I was completely paralyzed for about 10 seconds and then I came to.

Were those my astral arms?  Was I about to astral project or was it just a lucid dream?  Nothing like this has happened since, but just yesterday I learned about astral projection and it sounded an awful familiar to what happened to me.

[Lionheart]

 Hello Kayak and Welcome to the Astral Pulse! 

Congratulations on your successful Journey! 

I believe and this is just my personal opinion, that they are one in the same. It's just you have a different level of awareness. While Dreaming you are already in the Non Physical Reality or NPR as we like to call it here. Then you become you are aware in the Dream, known as Lucid, then you become so aware that you take over the Dream and may change it's locale or find yourself in a dark void, known as projecting. Basically it's like Dominoes. One leads to the next as long as you stay with the scene and don't physically awaken. But if you do you can go back into that Dream once again, I call this Re-Scripting. Then you can live the Dominoe effect all over again.

Good Luck and Safe Travels! 

[Bedeekin]

I have experienced a lot of OOBEs over the years where a dream was running simultaneously. I would come out of the experience having remembered a dream that was running alongside it... is another way of saying it. These happened at the beginning of my experiences... from about 11 to 20 yrs old. They sometimes happen now but I tend to enter the dream and leave the other one behind.

What is even more interesting is that whenever I have said this on forums it's never discussed or it is ignored. This is either because it puts a spanner in the works when it comes to the 'it's all the same thing' theory or it's not interesting enough to discuss.