I am setting an alarm on my phone for 4 am, so I can be jolted out of a dream and remember it and write it down. I often dream about cults and being poisoned. I want to do dreamwork to improve my dreams.
I used to have flying dreams and lots of lucid dreams. I am just getting back into dreamwork. I want to be a dream therapist. I want to use LD to unlock my psyche.
Any ideas of techniques I can use to improve dream recall? Then I can find what my dream signs are and keep track of them.
Speaking entirely from personal experience:
Writing down your dreams (or anything you remember) immediately when you wake up is my most effective way of bettering dream recall. The sooner you make notes of whatever you can remember, the better, and it will build each night from there.
A little more complicated and bit less reliable, but I’ve found it also to help sometimes is to try to dream about specific topics. If I try to incubate a dream about something specific, I’m more likely to remember when I do dream about it. It may just be the excitement and extra motivation you get from being in any way successful in incubating the dream to begin with.
The only other piece of advice I can think of is to make sure you write down your dreams (even just snippets) any time you wake up, whether by alarm or not. I personally find I have my strongest recall when I wake up randomly/naturally in the middle of the night.
Good luck 
I did it last night, woke up 1 am ish and wrote down a few sentences, couldnt get much. Had more dreams afterwards but I didnt like them as much so it was hard to motivate myself to get up and write it down. Are there ways I can motivate/push myself to write it down?
Its hard running to turn the light on after that point most of the dreams fade away. But I found a book light I had so I am going to see if grabbing that instead of running to turn the light on i could use that, maybe it would be easier.
Any other ideas? 
I completely understand the lack of wanting to record unpleasant dreams. Unfortunately, it’s something I think that you should consider doing anyway. There might be other benefits, maybe understanding why you’re having dreams you don’t like, etc, too.
As for the more technical aspects - needing to get out of bed to journal is definitely not great. I have in the past used a book light (but I found the battery started dying too quickly after while). The advantage there, though, is that you can limit how blinding that light is, as opposed to a lamp or room light. Less blinding means easier to fall back asleep, too.
I’ve also used pens that had LEDs in them. Personally I found that they always created a dark shadow around the tip, which made it hard to write legibly. Still, not a bad solution (it was easier to deal with than a battery powered book light). I’ve also just scribbled onto the paper in the dark with no lights. I don’t really recommend that, though. I’ve written over pages that had previous dreams on it, and the whole thing was sometimes totally illegible.
Alternative to trying to find an appropriate light - I’ve recently taken to occasionally using a note taking app on my cell phone. Each time I wake up, I create a new note and type in just the minimal amount of information to trigger my memory later in the morning.
Definitely try different things; find what works best for you.
I dont have a smart phone or id try that.
even when i have good dreams, im not that motivated to write them down. I get scared I would miss beautiful details and feelings and get into an all or nothing mindset.
I remember a few nights ago, before i decided to start a dream journal, I dreamed I met Simone Biles (a gymnastics champion) and she was teaching me gymnastics.
I have a lot of nightmares too and I do want to do dreamwork to see why they are coming to me and what I can learn from them.