Vanishing suddenly

I have returned to lucid dreaming after a long hiatus, and will be documenting my progress with <PERSON>. Hopefully this will keep me motivated and will help me to troubleshoot any issues I am experiencing. Although my past five or six attempts have not resulted in a lucid dream, they have been very promising, as I have been able to wake up while remaining still with my eyes closed. The first attempt I felt vibrations but then got excited and the vibrations subsided shortly after they started. In subsequent attempts I have woken up, but have been too alert to fall asleep. In part this has been related to excitement, but also it has been difficult navigating the paradox of trying without trying, and of looking without truly seeing. In other words, my trying too hard after waking up is probably counterproductive, and it is challenging to let images form before your eyes without focusing too intently and causing them to vanish. I am beginning to practice mindfulness during the attempts, which I think will help a great deal. I am still a little bit confused regarding how to facilitate the transition to a dream. If I hold onto a tiny slice of awareness, will this happen automatically? Or alternatively, do I need to reach some requisite level of relaxation and sleepiness, and then imagine the dream scene, and become enveloped by it? As I understand it, the latter is the recommended approach to <PERSON>, and this is how I will focus my efforts. I am a little confused by the use of mantras to anchor my thoughts during an attempt, but I could perhaps mindfully use an anchor until I start seeing hypnagogic imagery, and then start to imagine the sights, sounds, and tactile sensations of my previous dream. I think if I were less alert upon waking, the transition would be quicker to the dream, and there would be less room for error. Not my attempt last night but the one prior, I woke up tired and groggy, and felt like this was a good level of alertness. The mantra I used to set my intention that night was this: "I will wake up with my eyes closed, tired and groggy." Coincidence? I think not. I will try to incorporate this again into my bedtime mantra, but may also include something about remembering the previous dream and re-entering it. Experimentation time! Last night I was very stressed out before bed and was unable to wake up from a dream with my eyes shut or remaining still. My mantra was "I will wake up with my eyes closed," and I repeated it fewer times than normal, but the attempt was probably doomed to begin with because of how I was feeling. Here was one of my short dreams anyways: Dream "I am at a banquet with people from work and my girlfriend is there too. There is music playing, and she wants me to sing but I do not want to. We are sitting at circular tables with white table cloths. Someone at my table is singing a song about a relationship, and tells someone else to pretend that they are a mountain. I think he also had a newspaper cartoon section in front of him. I get up from the table and walk past some tables, and past one of my co-workers, and out the door where there is a piano with microphone outside. To the right of this there is a giant box of chocolates that look very delicious. One of them is spherical like a truffle, and has a long chocolate tail roughly 8 cm long, and has some sort of sparkle or sprinkle to it. That is the one I want."