I hit upon a new idea (new for me, anyway), that I wonder if it is similar to anything anyone else here has tried, and if there are any other suggestions for what I might change or improve upon.
The general idea for a reality check is to see if one is dreaming. In my case, though, I’ve noticed that I am too self correcting to realize that I am dreaming. (The other night I thought about how people can’t read things in dreams; I looked at something which I had thought I was reading, but realized that I simply knew what it was supposed to say and wasn’t actually reading it.)
This set me to thinking about what the ultimate goal is for reality checking. Lucidity itself is the focus, not dreaming, so I wondered what would happen if I started checking for when I felt lucid. That is, when I notice during my waking hours that I am awake and aware and alert.
I took a small stone bracelet that has absolutely no use but which I like for some reason, and designated it as a lucid stone. For one whole day, whenever I realized that I was lucid, I pulled it out of my pocket and paid attention to it, telling myself to increase lucidity.
I did a few other things, treating it like a video game controller - to interest myself more in what I was doing, to ground myself and gain control. One of my big problems is that I have trouble moving. So I decided if I turned it a little to the left, I’d turn left; tilting up and to the left means I’ll turn just my head. There are a few other things. It was kind of fun to go wandering through a park doing this, like I was a remote control being.
I lost the lucid stone a day or two ago, but I’m still able to visualize it in my head. I just don’t think of it as often if I don’t have the physical object with me.