lucid dreaming

As I alluded to in the previous post, I'd like to be able to do more lucid dreaming. I've been able to manage that a couple of times, but not very much, all in all. I know that I do some lucid dreaming, though I'm not able to implement it earlier on in a dream. When I notice that I am lucid dreaming is when I force myself awake when something bad is bad to happen in a dream. For instance, in a recent dream someone was going to cut me with a knife. Before he could do that I pushed myself to wake up.

One interesting thing is that I can sometimes try to wake myself up but struggle really hard to do so: I imagine this is when I'm really pretty deeply asleep. And I can feel the time pressure of trying to force my eyes open, before the bad thing I'm trying to avoid comes about.