Hi Nyx - firstly thanks again for taking the time to reply - your advice is simply invaluable - you've always got a kind word to say and I can't thank you enough for your help!

I'm keen to try your advise out. I had decided the other night to focus on trying to do one of the totm - thought I'd do your shoe one and figured one way to get over the panic thing is to focus on achieving something - as you said above
Be confident and stubborn
so I figure I'll make it my task to ask a DC I meet (nice or not) to borrow their shoes - I figure this will hopefully result in some interesting interactions and if I encounter some 'trouble' - ie sinister figures - this probably would disarm the situation ('can I borrow your shoes?' is probably enough to throw any misfit off their game!). If I can't see any dc's to ask I'll run around stamping my feet or bouncing and if I start to flop into the void I'll imagine I'm rubbing my disembodied hands on a rough carpet floor, I'd forgotten but I'd done this some months back and it seemed to be a good trick for me to stay longer in the dream.

I tried the tech last night after some rose. Think I'll avoid any red type wines - seem to lose my recall (white seems fine). Anyway had 1 dream - not sure to classify it as lucid or not (any advise accepted! vote - HERE!). Plus I think I should avoid getting too hot, the winter duvet seemed to make me duller (more hibernation mode I guess!).

LD 51? not sure whether to count this or not
Anyway had the following result, wt 4.30 I-AM 2 sec, 24mins. Usually I try and remain somewhat aware before the first vibe goes off (24mins) but I must have fallen asleep as the first vibe I felt when 'vrrmm, vrmm, vrrmm, vrmm' it took me a second and then I realised - 'that's not possible - this must be a LD' (as the vibe is set to only go off once every 24mins). So I slowly did the audio RC but this was correct - so obviously I had then truly woken up after realising that the alarm had been intergrated and changed (as it often is) into the dream. The way it changes is often a great clue it is happening in a dream as opposed to real life. It either repeats (like the above) or has audio as well.

So I am guessing I had drifted back in REM sleep - the vibe got incorporated in to a sort of FA (of me being in bed), I felt I was back in a deep sleep, and then my realisation must have actually woken me up. I went back to sleep very quickly after this, back almost straight into dream sleep - in fact I had some very really HH of seeing a book where whenever I looked at the page numbers - they changed, I knew this was a dream vision but it wasn't more than a sort of still image - so I am presuming (from previous experiences) this was a hypognaemic hallucination.

Anyway after that I have no dream recall at all, though I responded to the regular wakenings. By about 6.20am I started to get the signs a lucid might be coming up (again?) I start to get the audio RC echoing in my mind and was drifting off - when my daughter got up and that was it for the day!

Ah well! If I can get another 1-2 LD under my belt in a few more days using this method then I am really going to concentrate on daytime practice of stabilization and the tips you gave above - using mantras etc, having a pre-practiced game plan and really being confident of what I intend to do....fingers crossed! A little more success would boost my confidence a lot I think.

Whilst I feel I can at last call myself a lucid dreamer (and not just a fluke artist) after the last 2-3wks of successes I still feel like the most un-natural LD of all time! Yet I hope it might suddenly click a bit more and I'll suddenly get a stable LD of some length. I know I can do this, I just want to do asap! Cheers - T