Interupting your sleep cycles is a great way of inducing lucid dreams. You tend not to be conscious of dreaming in deep sleep as opposed to light sleeping at the end of a cycle.
This is why you tend to have vivid dreams when your alarm clock wakes you up but you continue to doze in and out of consciousness for a few hours or ten
Sleeping patterns tend to be in blocks of four hours so you can adjust to this to catch yourself just on the cusp of light sleeping. try sleeping from 11pm-7am but set your alarm for 6am and just whack the snooze button constantly for an hour. Fun times.
It's a really interesting hobby but people tend not to talk about it because it can be very personal sometimes. Perhaps it's really electromagnetic waves that manipulate our thoughts.
But that would be a conspiracy and I'm far to civilised to go down that route.