I'm about as SOL as you on the LD front, but I'll try to assist. You said that you go to bed telling yourself that you "need to realize that you are dreaming." Maybe it's just semantics, but telling yourself that you need to LD tonight places a lot of undue stress on your subconscious, telling it that it must do X such a thing or else, which gives it a lot of room to freak out and fail. Maybe a nicer approach would simply be to say not that you need to, but that you will.

Anyone have any thoughts on the wisdom of this? I just think that the term "I need to have an LD tonight" places great expectations on the subconscious and sets you up for a lot of subtle thoughts of failure if you don't in fact have that "needed" LD.