I had a phase a long time ago where I kept a dream journal and made some attempts at lucid dreaming. Ultimately, I was unsuccessful. The biggest obstacle was my dream recall. Memory of dreams leaves me very quickly after waking up, to the point that I wasn't consistently able to write down any of what had happened. (But interestingly, when I'm starting to get sleepy, imagery from previous nights' dreams sometimes starts passing through my mind's eye.)
On the rare occasion that I had an in dream realization about being asleep, it still seemed one "level" removed from a lucid dream. I never seemed to have true conscious awareness that I was within a dream. Rather, I think I had the waking thought "Okay, I'm going to try to induce a lucid dream", and that thought then manifested within my dreamscape. Kind of a fake awareness, if that makes any sense. I'd have the apparent realization that I was dreaming, but then the dream would proceed as if I didn't actually know that.
