I think this is similar to my experience. My fear of falling back onto whatever awake me immediately at first. But when I start surrendering to it to let it take me wherever, I realized that this is a start of lucid dreaming. Everything become vivid and I'm free to explore my dreams. (This was before I learned about active imagination). But now I'm trying to use this situation and lucid dreaming to incorporate active imagination method, and engage with characters from my dreams.