Welcome to Dreamviews!

When you're getting into sleep paralysis, it's not imperative that your eyes stay completely still - I move mine around quite a bit and still manage to get to SP. If the dry throat feeling gets bad enough, it can be worse for you than simply not making a big deal out of it and swallowing. It's no big deal if you swallow, as long as you don't bring it to the front of your mind and let it bug you.

It sounds like your body is relaxing, and you're fairly close. At the onset of SP, often one feels vibrations, heaviness, floating or rocking sensations, and may experience hallucinations or hypagogic imagery - strange patterns and colors behind their eyelids. Their eyes may go into REM and move around involuntarily. You can also have the feeling that your heart is beating much faster than it should, or stronger, which is merely a hallucination (unless of course, you're very excited to get into SP).

I get lots of small twitches too; I'm not sure what causes this but I'm guessing it's just from relaxing your body enough.

All I can suggest is to not focus on the hallucinations. Getting too involved will impede the dream formation process. Just keep relaxing. Try stretching or meditation before bed, if you feel like it's taking too long to get to SP after relaxing like you've described. Once you get the sensations listed above, imagine a dream forming around you and continue to relax into the SP. Imagine the sensations in the dream, including touch, sight, and smell. Imagine the feeling of walking down a road, if you want to end up on a highway.

If a dream starts to form but goes away, try again. You can always risk getting up and seeing if you've just entered a false awakening, but I wouldn't suggest this unless you're absolutely positive you're in a dream. It'd be best not to move and try using dream control - imagine someone walking over to you and saying something specific, such as "come on, wake up!" If you're in a dream, something like this will happen. If not, it doesn't matter because you haven't moved! So, you can try entering a dream again.