I’ve been having a bit of a tough time convincing myself that I can wake up without an alarm, and believe that this will also affect my MILD attempts. I know that I can do it, since I’ve done it every Christmas Eve for years, but I’m not sure that I can muster that same level of intention for it every night. I know that the belief that I’ll wake up from the alarm has helped my autosuggestion before, since I’ve woken up at 5:40 after missing my alarm when I intended to.
It’s a bit of a vicious circle: I don’t think that I’ll wake up, and so I don’t, but when I finally convince myself that I will, it doesn’t work. Then I believe that I really won’t wake up, and it takes more and more to convince myself that I will on the next attempt; when that doesn’t happen, the whole thing repeats. This is pretty counterproductive, but I’m not really sure how I can truly convince myself that I’ll wake up.
Also, kind of unrelated, but when people say that you have to remember “at least one dream per night” before attempting lucid dreaming, does it have to be one complete dream from start to finish, or can it be a reasonably large portion of a dream? I can write lots on a single portion of the dream, since I’ll usually remember them in quite a bit of detail, but usually don’t remember the whole thing.
Thanks 
Try doing meditation and visualise yourself waking up at your time.
You usually dont have to remember the whole dream. If u can recall a significant portion of a dream, then i think that will be sufficient.
Hmmm. My subconscious has always been very good at waking me up when I ask it to (unless I’m really tired or sick). But that could be because I always expected that to work…
Do you ever wake up right before your alarm goes off because you subconsciously know it’s going to go off? That’s also an example of waking up at a certain time without an alarm waking you up.
You also might want to try something similar while you’re awake to build your confidence that this can work. Try telling yourself that you’ll remember to look at the clock at a certain time. When you can get that working reliably, you can try extending it to waking up at a certain time.
Thanks for the replies 
That sounds like a good idea though (looking at the clock at a certain time). I’ve noticed lately, since I’ve actually been paying attention to it, that usually my subconscious clock is accurate to within a couple of minutes (I can predict the time pretty consistently), and also realised that generally I don’t actually wake up from my alarm unless I suggest it to myself. Both of these seem to indicate that my autosuggestion is working.
One other thing I’ve been doing is writing down my intention to wake up to solidify it. I woke up yesterday night with my cell phone’s alarm out of NREM, so it seems to be working.