Explorations Into Lucid Dreaming

    I've always loved dreaming.  Probably because I tend to have crazy dreams that involve riding unicorns, flying, fighting dragons, and other such awesome adventures.  Unfortunately, I do tend to have pretty horrific nightmares.  I'm also pretty good at my remembering my dreams.  Within the last couple years, however, I've decided I would like to try to develop lucid dreaming skills.  In lucid dreaming you are aware that you're dreaming and may be able to change the plot of your dreams.  Although apparently being aware you're dreaming and affecting your dreams can occur independently of one another.
     There's a few reasons I want to become a lucid dreamer.  Supposedly, it can be a good cure for nightmares.  It makes sense I guess.  I wouldn't be as scared if I knew it was a dream, or if I could make the nightmare around me end in favor of becoming a tree-house-dwelling cat-human.  Plus it would be awesome to decide you want to go cave diving with luminescent algae one night and then do it!  I'm also very intrigued by the idea of astral projection or out of body experiences which, it seems, are closely related to lucid dreaming.  Although, that's slightly scary because some people claim you can get stuck out of your body.  I don't know if I believe that though.  (When I was kid I was totally into that stuff and read books on astral projection, and auras, and telepathy, and feeling colors, and the power of crystals, and all that sort of stuff.) I think trances, and meditation, and some other phenomena that you hear about with Eastern religions may also be tied in there somehow. So, if I can learn to dream lucidly, maybe it will help me learn to meditate and vice verse.  On that stuff, I'm not very informed, and I'm mostly making connections in my head, so I apologize if I'm completely off-base. 
     Now hopefully I will be capable of learning to do this.  They say one of the first steps is learning to recall your dreams.  For awhile when I was in high school I tried keeping a dream journal but didn't stick with it.  I tried again within this past year, but with school I found that I was so tired that when I woke up at night I just wanted to go back to sleep and didn't care to take the time to write down my dreams.  So, it kinda fell through again.  I think relating all my dreams in detail to my froomies has helped though.  Lately I've had lots of dreams that I've been able to remember pretty well.
     I was reading up on how to induce lucid dreaming and sites that I looked at mentioned that you have to sort of go through a sleep paralysis stage where your body goes to sleep but your mind is still aware.  I think I've inadvertently experienced this in the past, and I bet you have too.  On several occasions during my life I have "awoken" but felt trapped like I couldn't move and couldn't make my eyes open.  If you've experienced that you know it's scary as heck!  I'm not sure that it's exactly the same thing, but from what I've read it sounds somewhat similar.  So anyway, my thought is that if I can already do a good job of recalling my dreams and experience sleep paralysis, maybe it won't be too difficult for me to learn to control my dreams.
     I think I'll take a nap this afternoon and try it then.  If you don't see me for a very long time, come check my room and shake me awake to make sure my spirit isn't trapped outside my body.  I don't really want to be floating around in space while my brain turns to mush.

Update:
I just woke up from a nap.  First attempt is a fail. 

Update:
I've found what I believe to be a great site to help me lucid dream:
http://www.dreamviews.com/content/
I'm going to use this site as my guide.