Well this hardly seems fair

So I got to my first moment of lucidity last night.

I ran into a piece of destroyed city (think of Crysis 2, and you'll get the picture). I recognize it as if I had been there before and suddenly a connection is made that I am dreaming. Immediately afterwards my thoughts are overwhelmed by stress and anxiety, not because I finally became lucid, no. I thought I overslept for work and got smashed back into waking life.

Cause for this was me figuring out at 1.30AM that I had to go to work at 7.00AM that day. I only had 4 hours of sleep remaining at that point. So my 'natural' response to me finding out that I was dreaming, and therefore sleeping, was to worry about me not missing my shift...

That just goes to show stress hampers LD progress...

A common problem with beginners is to stress too much. Lucid dreams will certainly occur in time and they will fail and be cut short frequently. Even experienced dreamers sometimes found their dreams cut short because of loss of stability. A good advice for you is that better chance to have a good lucid dream is when you sleep solid 8 hours or so. The less you sleep, the fewer chances you have to attain lucidity. It takes time for your subconcious to get used to the idea of lucid dreaming and to separate realities from each other.

Cheers for the next one :)

Note that it wasn't so much the realisation of me dreaming that woke me. It was the fear of being late for work.

You can always summon a watch that will keep track of waking reality time for you. It works wonders.