Hi all…I haven’t really been trying to have lucid dreams lately, but I have been working on dream recall. Last night I was having a dream in which I was at a sleepover with my friends and I suddenly realized I was dreaming. I started spinning to keep myself asleep and when I opened my eyes the dream was much more vivid. I tried to fly off the couch, but I couldn’t, so I decided I wasn’t dreaming and lost lucidity. Do you have any tips for staying lucid? Thanks!
Hi cechchelseablues! Welcome to LD4all! 
First of all, you should have performed a Reality Check in order to verify if you were dreaming. Good reality checks are pinching your nose and try to breathe through, or try to make your finger go through your palm, or look at your hands and see if their shape changes.
Once you realize you’re dreaming, a good prolonging method is to stare at your hands from time to time. It gives a boost to your lucidity each time you look at them.
Sometimes, a good tip for increasing your lucidity or controling your dream is using verbal commands. For instance, in order to increase lucidity, shout “Increase lucidity!”
Then if you lose visuals, you can rub your hands or spin.
Good luck in your further LD’s! 
Like Basilus said, it’s always good to perform reality checks, especially after your done a technique like dream spinning.
It’s also good to RC every few minutes within the dream no matter what your doing, this will help keep you lucid
I had a dream that someone was rolling up a joint on a Pool table. He offered me one, and I took it. I realized it was a dream because I don’t do drugs. All of a sudden, instead of everything becoming clearer, everything went away and I was in a white room with a calculator. I started to compute why I hadn’t become lucid. I had a pressing awareness that I wasn’t really asleep, that I had woken up and I was now daydreaming. So I decided to open my eyes. Looking back, I was really asleep. Can anyone explain this out for me?
Normally I can just command my lucidity to increase. When this fails I typically spin and focus on the feeling of spinning (beware: this often causes you to re-appear in a different location).
I’m pretty sure that spinning and rubbing your hands help you stay in a dream because they increase your focus and awarness.
IMO, it’s a kind of classical false awakening.
cechchelseablues, I always use at least two reality checks because I have also had the flying test fail when I was really dreaming.
This has always struck me as being a strange thing - losing lucidity, because I’ve never really understood how it could happen. Having said that, I experienced something similar in my first lucid dream. The moment I realised I was dreaming, everything seemed so incredibly vivid and real that it may as well have been real life. It was such a shock that it was practically the mental equivalent of being socked, hard, in the stomach. But it seemed so realistic that for a while, like you, I was questioning whether it was really a dream or whether I had somehow been transported to an unfamiliar place without my remembering it (I imagine that’s what people with amnesia must feel like when they first regain their senses, because for a moment I thought I had amnesia myself)!
Still, I reassured myself it had to be a dream due to the un-coordinated combination of pyjamas and a tank top I was wearing (I would never go around in public dressed like that in reality!), so that was enough to convince me. But even if I’d decided otherwise, it strikes me as strange that something so vivid and strong could so easily take away your awareness. It seemed exactly the opposite to me - I found it very easy to focus on things!
I’ve never lost lucidity once I got it (aside from waking up), so my advice on this is of course limited. The best I can do is just say to stay focused. Perhaps think of it in the same way you would when you’re studying for an exam - don’t let your mind wander too much, and keep your eyes open and alert. I hope this helps!