Hello like-minded community!
I've been reading these forums for over a year now and it never occurred to me to actually join : P This will be my first forum post ever- congratulations internet, you've finally won.

Anyways- I've been doing some "independent study" on lucid dreaming for 2 years now and have had some limited success, I think this is because I haven't really sat down and taken the time to immerse myself into the experience and culture behind it. However, I have be very adamant about keeping a dream journal over all of these years and I hold that book to be the most important item in my possession. I approach the recollection of dreams to be an exercise in making the most of the time that we have before we assume room temperature : )
Even though to the outsider my EXTREMELY poorly handwritten pages (I sometimes write a dream down in the dark, fall asleep and forget that I've even dreamt until I check my journal in the morning and hilariously translate and remember the dream) may seem like an exercise in 3rd grade calligraphy but I wouldn't trade them for anything.

So here is what I'm currently working on and would like some sagely advice:

How do you keep attempting lucids and get enough sleep to go to work/school?

During waking life, how can you emphasize a particular moment/piece of scenery to dream about?
I find that sometimes a thought I have had for maybe 2 seconds during the day is what I end up dreaming about when I try to dream about what I think for the 40 minutes until transitioning to sleep. What's up with that? Although I know you can't force yourself to dream about something, there's probably some way you can maybe make it more likely.

Getting past the "Waiting Room", the black nothingness after you get past the hypnogogic visuals/audio. I'm stuck in there for a long time and end up falling asleep after taking an hour to get to there : (

There's more, but I guess I should probably put the questions in the right threads. Just trying to get a good start and grab the attention of somebody who has pushed passed these problems. And thanks to everyone here at dreamviews for their endless supply of lucid dreaming motivation- whenever I wanted to get inspired for an attempt, I'd go here and read first : )