Progress!

So here is something interesting...I actually remembered something!  Yes!  So for the last few weeks I've been attempting to go through the steps I normally have used in the past to get into an astral state.  It hasn't been working, but I'm certainly not giving up.  Today I laid down and went through my usual rigamarole and nothing seemed to be happening.  None of the vibrations that should be there...nothing.  So I got out of that state for a minute by opening my eyes and decided to start over.  I closed my eyes and went through it again, faster this time because I didn't need all of the relaxation stuff I normally do at the beginning.  Nothing was working so I opened my eyes AND I WAS IN A DIFFERENT ROOM!  Without losing a conscious feeling.  No buzzing.  Yes.  A completely different room in a completely different bed still trying to astral project.  At first it didn't seem strange that I was in this different room.  I just had a frustrated feeling that I'd have to start over and so I closed my eyes to try again as if it were completely normal for me to be someplace else.  I started to go through my meditation again and this time it started to work (it always works from a lucid dream!).  I got the vibrations and begun to see what I usually see which is sort of like...static that I go through...right to someplace of my choosing normally.  So I'm halfway down into these vibrations when it occurs to me that OH MY GOD THAT WASN"T MY ROOM!!!!  I immediately opened my eyes and I was back in my boring old room and was awake.  And believe me, I had to double check to make sure that it wasn't a false awakening.  So it seems that when I had these experiences the first time around, my recall and my sense of immediately knowing that things were different kept me in my experiences and lucid.  Now I will say that I didn't even really notice that this new room I was in was somehow off, or not real, until it was too late!  Had I picked up on the fact that I was in a lucid dream, I would have stayed in it!  How is it possible to lose the ability to recognize a dream state!?  I mean, it was a perfectly real room and it felt like it was mine and that I'd been there all along trying to induce an astral projection.  It was hindsight that brought this to my attention too late to make use of it, either to continue down the path to astral projection or simply stay lucid and get up and walk around!  So frustrating!  How do you clue yourself in and recognize a dream state?  I've always gone through to these things in a perfectly mind-awake state through meditation (which is what I was doing today and I'll say I never lost the conscious feeling today either...t felt totally seamless) so I knew when I went through every single time...and my checks were more so to double check that I was awake, no to see if I had entered a dream.  What do I do???  What happened to my recognition???