Hey, I've read multiple times that staring fixedly in one spot or at one thing will wake you after approximately five seconds.

Clare Johnson wrote this in her book LLewellen's Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming. "There’s a simple rule when it comes to nightmares, one we all will have noticed: the more fearful we are, the worse the nightmare tends to become. This is because dreams are highly thought-responsive environments. The dreaming mind is a marvelous morphing machine." So changing your way of thinking could really help. By that, I mean changing your expectations of what will happen within the dream. If you try to stay lucid in the dream that will help you to be aware enough to not let the unpleasant things bother you too.

There's also a possibility that you could take something positive from your dreams. Clare also writes, "Imagine dreaming about the genesis of a monster patched together from the different body parts of dead humans, as Mary Shelley did before she wrote Frankenstein, or suffering repeated dreams of healing people by day and murdering them by night, as did Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These authors tapped into their most terrifying nightmares and successfully turned them into fiction. Such is the power of fearful dream images that when they are turned into art, they can infiltrate the minds of others until what was a personal nightmare image becomes a collective one.
Try writing your nightmare into a story."

Also, one more potentially helpful quote. "In Deirdre Barrett’s book The Committee of Sleep, painter and sculptor Paul Laffoley reports what seems to be a lucid nightmare where he was in an art gallery in which thirteen sculptures were exhibited. They glowed radiantly due to a light source placed between mirrors.
My first reaction was complete jealousy … Here I was, hysterically jealous. Enraged, I stewed, “Everything in this show has completely wiped me out! ... All the forms I’ve been thinking about or could think about for years and years to come are expressed in this work.” … I was overcome with terror … I knew I was trapped in the gallery and would surely die if I did not get out of this dream and out of the presence of these sculptures. That is when I did wake up, screaming.

It took Laffoley several weeks to realize that instead of feeling cursed by this dream, he could accept it as a priceless creative gift. He understood he could learn from what he had witnessed in his dream, and the designs he subsequently produced brought him major success as an artist. He remarks: 'My art began then to develop into what it is today.'"

I wish you best of luck with having more pleasant dreams. Hopefully some of what is written here can be of use.
And welcome to the forums! There is a lot of useful information to be found here