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For some background, I used to be really good at lucid dreams. If you want a bit more detail, look at my bio, (I think, my profile seems to hate me right now...) but I soon lost it. I've heard of the plugging your nose, or looking around and recognizing patterns, but the only thing that seems to work for me is telling myself "When I wake up, I'll be dreaming" But that only seems to work half the time, and when it does, it is really short or crappy dreams. So... am I missing something?
You might want to look into more techniques and try different ways of reaching lucidity. It's all about finding the motivation to keep on going. Set up a few goals, visualize, try WILD'ing and WBTB's. To prolong the dreams, do nothing but activate as many senses as you can. Touch things, smell and look at them closely. Rubbing your hands is a good way. After that you want to ground yourself in the dream by believing you won't wake up. Then try not to think about the fact that you're dreaming, that will wake you up.
When we dream we utilize the secondary visual cortices in our brains. When we visualize we are using the same area. This is scientific fact (look it up). My advice to anyone attempting to force an LD is to practice deep muscle relaxation techniques and visualize, visualize , visualize!