I’ve been working on LDing as long as I’ve been here and I’ve made alot of progress. On Wednesday I had my first LD longer than a second and my second one in total. I was also starting to remember alot of my dreams at the end of the summer, but scince back to School on the 5th I’ve only remembered 3! And if it wasn’t for me telling myself to remember my dream when i was Lucid I’d only have two. This is because I don’t sleep in as late, but mostly because my alarm clsock. When it wakes me up I can’t remember anything, all I think about is the noise of it (it’s a horrible sound and very loud). I really need to boost my memory back up, but I can’t go without the alarm on school days ( i obviously have it off on weekends). Any suggestions, I keep a DJ and tell my self to remember before sleep.
I have this same problem. The urgency of shutting off the alarm clock causes me to forget my dreams, too. I don’t really have time to write in my DJ on school mornings, though, so pretty much my solution is to just wait for the weekend.
I find anything that wakes me up suddenly causes me to forget my dreams, even if I was having one right at the point I was disturbed.
The best thing you can do, is alter your sleeping pattern slightly so you wake up a few minutes before your alarm.
You should leave it on on weekends.
…what?
I have the exact same problem, although since I’m just getting back into dreaming in general after about a year off, I’m having trouble anyway. 
I normally turn off my alarm on my weekends so I sleep in more. Although, I think tonight I’ll leave it set and then practice WBTB. I have to be up by about 8:30 anyway, so it isn’t a big deal. I have heard that if you stabilize your sleep schedule you can train yourself to wake up before your alarm goes off, as Mohegan suggests.
So I’ll just wish you luck, LD_47, and you wish me luck too, okay? 
It depend on the way you wake up when your alarm clock is working.
I think the best thing to do it’s to open the eyes slowly and not moving too much quickly. And you will have a chance to remember something.
Otherwise, it’s better to write everything you remember even if it’s a little dream. Maybe if you don’t have the time to write it, just make a table. You can fill it with the number of characters, the kind of place (forest, town…), the action (running, fighting, …) and also give it a title which can help you to remember the theme of the dream… and sometimes, when you read this table you can remember all the dream and then write it completely when you came back home for exemple.
Ok MarioMega i’ll wish you luck, and it seems that my weekend memory hasn’t suffered as I remembered a small bit of one dream and an extremely long and detailed amount of another dream, even without sleeping in (I’m sick so I couldn’t get back to sleep because of my throat)
I have noticed that waking up naturally provides much better dream recall than waking up to an alarm clock. Alarm clocks ‘shock’ you out of your dream state and for me when I hear it it is like my reminder of school, what I have to do that morning etc so my dream is forgotten.
I would suggest maybe getting a different alarm clock? If you own a cell phone, set the alarm clock on that but with soothing music so that your waking isnt as abrupt. Thats really all that I can think of. 
A friendly Hello to everybody here!
I just registered and decided to introduce myself in this topic/“First Steps to Lucidity” simply because I wasn’t sure where else to do this.
I would consider myself a beginner - the keyword here is “would” because I already attempted to learn lucid dreaming and succeeded at least three times (dreams where about one or two minutes in lucid mode before I woke up)…but as I’m a human being I got too lazy, too greedy, whatever at times. Before I knew it I didn’t even record my dreams anymore.
At the moment I’ve got lots of spare time on my hands and therefore this could be THE opportunity to really learn LDing - thus I’m looking to this community for support (like-minded people etc.)
Enough about me
Waking up naturally surely is the best way to remember your dreams, but I found that waking up to a radio station (not too loud though) works nearly equally well (at least for me). One caveat: there still is the temptation of just hitting the button and “just another 5 minutes”…we all know what that can lead to 
Being awakened by news or music isn’t as startling as waking up to the usual “bleep, bleep, bleep” so I don’t have to worry too much about turning the alarm off, giving me the opportunity to begin recording my dreams…
Hope this helps…
Good Luck!
Sean