Whyamiani

Best reality checks imo:

-- Look at hands
-- Try breathing with mouth and nose closed
-- Try reading text (it will look weird in a dream)
-- Flip a light switch. Usually something weird will happen, like it makes a sound.
-- Try pushing your hand through something solid
-- (if you're advanced, you can even get a tattoo to help you, as it will be here permanently. Head to my Insta link to see mine)

If you are struggling, the most important thing you can do is remain confident that it will happen in time. The more discouraged you get, the harder it will be. I was NOT a natural. It took me 4 months of intense practice to get my first lucid dream. Others claim to just have them naturally without trying. If you haven't, keep a dream journal in a notebook or via voice recorder and record in it immediately upon waking. Listen back to your journal to remind your brain what a remembered dream is like, and to encourage your subconscious to recall more, increasing likelihood of lucidity over time.

Not anymore, but when I was a young boy. I'll just be real honest: as a young boy, filled with depression and anger and just general confusion about reality, pretty much all I did in my lucid dreams was fly, fuck, and kill. As I look at forums, this seems to be the case for many young minds. To be honest, I don't see a problem with this, as long as it is being used as a way to vent these emotions and not stoke them into something worse. Now that I am older, I literally would not even be able to bring myself to touch someone without permission lol, even though it's just a dream. If I am ever in an angry mood and feel like having a fight, I will form a fair match in the dream, like a boxing tournament, and then celebrate with whoever my enemy was afterward. I want healing and peace now, not anger. As a kid, I probably would have tortured the person in my dreams.

How has it affected my mind in the long term? I think it allowed me to explore avenues of reality in a safe way that I simply otherwise wouldn't be able to. I have killed. I have committed genocide. I have done horrible, horrible things. But it was all just in my head. And now I know beyond any doubt that to do anything even remotely similar in real life is wrong on its face, not wrong for a particular reason. It's just wrong. I've been there. I know this in my bones. I honestly think this partly influenced my entire worldview as I am extremely antiwar and staunchly in favor of policies that help those in poverty and who are suffering first and foremost, even if it means less for me. To put it simply, those experiences gave me an incredible depth of empathy that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to access outside of hearing other peoples' stories through books or documentaries or talking, etc.

When I was a young boy it was all about powers and sex, of course. But even to this day, 19 years of practicing later, I LOVE to fly. I love creating whole new planets with alien and unexpected life, then flying through these environments. I also particularly enjoy seeking out intelligent dream characters (most dream characters act like NPC robots, just repeating the same thing or talking nonsensically, but some of them seem SO incredibly real and some even express being perfectly aware they are a dream character inside your head) and asking them about their philosophies and ideas. Ultimately, you are just talking and discovering more about your own mind.

Also, I'm really, really fond of the roulette experience of walking through a mirror. It still makes me a bit scared to this day when I'm in the moment. You walk through the mirror, and see where you end up. Could be amazing, could be terrifying, could be nothing, could be surprising. Your own mind becomes a total surprise, for better or worse.

Quick! Reality check now!! Do 3 just in case!!!

Absolutely, you can use your normal routine to your advantage! Part of the MILD technique, one of the most well known and widely practiced techniques, involves visualizing yourself or imagining yourself in specific locations doing specific activities. This level of specificity helps you stay one-pointed and focused on the task at hand -- staying or becoming lucid.

Ideally, you would practice allowing the affirmations to fill the background of your mind while the foreground focuses on your visual imagination. This would actually represent a very advanced version of MILD technique and is something advanced lucid dreamers utilize to achieve lucidity nearly every single night (though I prefer a mix between WBTB and WILD, I exclusively practiced MILD for the first few years of getting into this practice).

So, you are in a great position already! Don't get discouraged! The truth is that there is no single best way to achieve lucidity; you might be discovering a very specific method that works for you and might even help others in the future as well!