Thread: Intro and a few questions

I've known about lucid dreaming for about half a year. Recently I found this page and decided to join. I'm also going to start my dream diary tonight. I've got one question about this, for the last month I've tried to remember dreams every morning (without a diary) but couldn't remember anything. If that happens tonight it doesn't really help to have a dream diary next to my bed. Are there any ways in which I can enhance the probability of remembering ANYTHING of the dream?
I've had a few lucid dreams before:
In one of them I was walking on a corridor with a few (unknown) people I did a dream check: looked at my hand and noticed it had 7 fingers. But I woke up almost immediately and didn't have time to do anything cool
In the second one I was walking trough an empty marketplace-like area, which I had never seen before. I realized it wasn't any place I would go to and became lucid. Suddenly a bus started racing towards me from somewhere. I kind of slammed my arms towards it and it's front side flew high into the air . After that I woke up
One more question: How do I "stabilize" the dream so that I don't wake up within a few seconds?
Ps. If anyone knows where I can find a cool picture of a wizard for my profile picture it would be appreciated.