Hey I can relate to your feeling, right now I'm having 1-4 lucid dreams a week but they are only lasting 10-40 seconds. I have never really used reality checks they just don't work for me. Using a dream journal would have to be the best technique out there, the more you remember your dreams and reflect on them during the day, the more you are making them part of your life. I know how much it can be a pain in the neck getting straight out of bed doing it. Every morning possible write all your dreams down. After there all written down read through them all 3 times and each time you read through them try to have a mental image of the dream happening inside your head (like your actually accessing that dream memory) If anything new comes to mind which it mite not, write it down.

During the course of the day when your not doing anything just have a think of your dreams like they were things you have done in real life and think of different choices you could of made. The idea is that you want to bring your dreaming life as close to your waking life as much as possible. Sometime in the afternoon just have a re-read of the dreams you had that morning.

Do this for 2 months and I'll pretty much guarantee you success. You will most likely start having lucid dreams in about a month i recon but i've said 2 to be on the save side so try to stick with it that long. It might seem like a long time but once you can do it, it is only up from there. This method will improve your results with all other techniques but the good thing is you will have natural lucid dreams where you will just discover you will be dreaming in a normal dream and become lucid.

Hope it helps, good luck