Meow ^^
Apparently I need to make 5 posts just to view profiles so I figured why not start by contributing something.
I’d like to talk about something thats very general, and then how it can be applied by an aspiring lucid dreamer - the tao of learning as i see it 
. I realise some of it may be a bit controversial, so feel free to argue, because I still need to write 4 more posts.
Whatever skill you look at, there will be people who have been doing it their whole life, and yet stay mediocre. I have seen old guys in the park who have been playing chess for 60 years that can be easily beaten by a skilled 9 year old. Clearly, it is not the amount of time nor effort they dedicated to learning that determines their skill. Similarly, there are people who spend lots of time trying to lucid dream, and yet its still a crapshoot for them.
There is a particular mindset that takes a huge part of the blame. It is so popular, that it can be seen in one of the dumbest proverbs the humanity has produced to date - “practice makes perfect”. People keep saying they suck so they need to practice more. It’s like a cult, the Church of the Holy Practice. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, it reinforces the habits, makes them persistent. I have seen this pitfall when I tried to coach (chess) a very intelligent person past a level that he got stuck on (way below his intellectual potential). He would blame his errors on not solving enough problems, when it was clear he is just missing the big picture. It is a bit like someone who only learned to run backwards and insisted that he can be a 100 meter sprint champion - if he just practiced enough.
(or a lucid dreamer who would LD a lot - if he made more reality checks)
Therefore, just the motivation to put some effort might only be helpful in short term. If you want to improve in the long-term, beyond the legions of mediocre people, you have to be critical towards yourself, analyse where you go wrong and yes, reevaluate your entire approach when you feel you got stuck. If you cannot lucid dream at will, and you have been trying for a few months, you are doing something wrong, and no, its not the amount of reality checks.
The motivation that you need to have is the one to be proven wrong, to change the way you think about certain ideas completely. The motivation to find a way around a wall instead of the motivation to keep banging your head against it trying to break it.
When you fail, look for the cause, and let this cause be one that you can do something about. If you miss a dream sign, that’s a perfect opportunity to learn! Replay the dream in your mind. Remember what you thought then. Now edit the dream, think to yourself what you should have - “this makes no sense, so it’s a dream”. Now play the edited version in your mind, where you become lucid and even go on doing something you wanted to. That’s how you create new habits. That’s how you learn.
Just don’t go “I missed my dream sign, because I’m not making enough reality checks”.
The next big point I’d like to talk about is what I call the ABC mentality. It is often a good idea to have it when you start learning something from the very beginning. It’s following simple idiot-proof step by step instructions to get your feet wet and get some experience before moving to deeper waters. This is what you get when you look at LD tutorials, like the one on ld4all.com website. WBTB, MILD, RCs, dream recall, just follow the instructions, add a bit of intent and you will get some lucid dreams. Hard to go wrong.
There are a couple of issues that may not be obvious at first. ABC is nothing more than training wheels, something that is there to grow out of. Once you get a first-hand experience of how the techniques work, you can and should develop your own style based on the patterns you have noticed, of what tends to work for you. Don’t be afraid of experimenting and of making up your own hypotheses, but also remember the value of common sense.
The other issue is that beginners are often flooded with all sorts of -ILDs, which often causes confusion and distracts them from the ABC they need. Don’t focus on details until you master the basics.
Once you graduate from ABC, you may want to look back at the popular techniques and reevaluate them. For example, these are my thoughts about some of them:
MILD - Works, but very unreliable. Similar to repeating to yourself 100 times “I will remember to buy toilet paper” before going shopping. I stopped doing it altogether with no decrease in LDs.
RCs - Works, but not for the reason most people think it does. The idea is that you train yourself to regularly check if you’re dreaming, which may be intuitive, but it assumes you’re thinking rationally in the dream while you’re doing it. Countless stories about failed RCs show it’s not so easy. This technique got popular because it makes so much sense to people, and because people like Laberge have written about it, but in my opinion, its not the check itself that works (in fact, I found it to be counterproductive), but the thought that you may be dreaming.
Stopped doing them completely, and the frequency of LDs increased slightly, because instead of programming myself to perform reality checks (which may fail), I programmed myself to get lucid straightaway.
WBTB - Works very well, almost necessary for WILD unless you’re able to maintain awareness in deep sleep.
WILD - Very reliable and easy, you just need to do 2 things at the same time - fall asleep and stay aware, which is about 20 points shorter than an average WILD tutorial I’ve seen. Lots of people seem to have problems with it and so would I if I had read one of these. Fortunately the only thing I knew when I tried it for the first time was to just fall asleep and observe.
I’d like to finish this wall of text by giving some examples of what I considered to be common sense when learning to LD. I wasn’t a natural lucid dreamer, so I had to learn it from scratch.
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I used to have a recurring nightmare, so I decided next time I get it, I will realise it’s a dream. That’s how I got my first LD.
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I wanted to get lucid often. Because dreams reflect waking life, I decided I have to become lucid in waking life often as well - feel the same shift in awareness, to the point of pretending I’m in a dream and I’m realising it. After getting into habit of doing that, I started getting lucid dreams spontaneously.
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When I had a nonlucid dream, I would review it before sleep the next night, pretending I got lucid at some point and making up the rest of it. I never had a dream journal, I just used to write tag words for each dream on a random piece of paper. It’s usually enough to make me remember the rest of the dream clearly for the reviewing process the next night.
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Dream recall is important, but again not for the reason most people think. It’s not so that you won’t forget your lucid dream! The main reason is that you only remember that which you experienced consciously, and the more you train yourself to remember dreams, the more your consciousness will take part in them, which means higher chance of getting lucid. The nice side effect is that good dream recall often means you start waking up naturally in 1.5h cycles, which means many WBTBs with no side effects.
Comments/thoughts/ideas appreciated.
drow
And your first one, at that! You are very welcome to LD4all, I’m sure your addiction to the community will be invaluable. 
It will do you a whole lot of good!
True, though, quality matters more than quantity when it comes to practice. I’ll definitely take that re-visualization tip. Thanks!
It’s so good to see you on the forum!
But surely he’s very welcome to the forum, you’re right. 
I’ve seen so many people say they’ve been trying for years to lucid dream and have tried every single technique and still haven’t been… well, I say they should really read this post! 
He also talks about the whole technique thing.
? I didn’t say ABC approach is useless, just that it’s there to be recognised as such