lucid

My experience with lucid dreaming has been a difficult one.

I was able to lucid dream as far back as I can remember (I guess around 3), but I am always unable to control them, I just realize I'm dreaming. Also, anytime I attempt to purposely induce a lucid dream, it doesn't work, but if I just go to sleep as normal, I will often have them. It's really confusing.

So, what would be a good technique to induce lucid dreaming? Most methods that I have tried, failed.

Also, does anyone have advice to better control my dream when I become lucid? Because they often go like this:

I realize I'm dreaming and think, "oh cool, I finally had a lucid dream", then things go bad (more on that in a minute), OR I'm in the middle of an extremely surreal dream and suddenly become conscious of everything being so over the top, I know I must be dreaming, and become lucid.

Now, when I say "things go bad", every time upon becoming lucid, my dream takes a turn for the worse. It will turn into a scary dream of some sort either with a psycho murderer suddenly appearing in my dream and trying to kill me, zombies chasing me, or a demonic entity attacking me.

I will repeat to myself repeatedly "this is just a dream" or "I'm in complete control" and will attempt to change the dream, but to no avail. So I end up becoming so freaked out by my dream induced "monster" and try to "wake myself up".

It's a never ending cycle that I have tried for years to break and it's beyond frustrating, so any advice on why this is happening or ways to change it will be GREATLY APPRECIATED.

Thanks for reading.