Maybe you sleep a little too lightly perhaps? That you are barely asleep and when you become lucid you wake up too much in the dream so you wake up for real? That's my uneducated guess.
Greater awareness of stimuli from the dream would pull his awareness away from real world stimuli.
Let me ask you, what exactly are you doing when you try to stabilize? What are you doing physically, and what's going on mentally i.e. what are you focusing on?
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