I’m curious for the experienced MILDers out there – with MILD, one is exercising prospective memory to remember to recognize that one is dreaming. But it is done within the context of one particular dream, visualized over and over again as one is falling asleep. Can this also be considered a form of dream incubation? How successful is MILD if the visualized dream does not occur? What percentage of the time does MILD result in the visualized dream occuring, for various MILD experience levels. In other words, is the occurence of the visualized dream important to lucidity success with MILD?
Normally the visualized dream doesn’t occur, I practice dream incubation, as well as MILD, and they are quite similar because the fact that mnemonics, intention, and expectation is how you incubate and how you MILD, so they build on each other, in my opinion. I have never read much research on the matter. 
When MILDing, you are really trying more to get the idea in your head and reinforcing the idea with visuals. When dream incubating you are trying to get a visual and reinforcing it with ideas. Hope this makes sense. I like to visualize me becoming lucid in different parts of the day, so that it seeps into my dreams and my mind thinks “It is normal for him to realize that he is dreaming” When that idea pops in my head, it may result in a dream about a lucid dream, but in my experience, if you have good recall, you will have good awareness and these dreams about lucid dreams will easily switch into full lucid dreams.
It is very effective without the dream occurring, you may think that it is a “random LD” if you are lucid at the very beginning of the dream, but that is one of the ways for MILD to work. MILD however is a technique that gets better over time. If it works 1/30 nights for you (once a month) at first, it might work 1/29 times the next month. One a month might not seem a lot, but if it can always get better and better, then think about when you get it to 2X or 3X a night. This takes consistency, practice, and studying what works for visualizing. Consistency is consistency of trying and a consistent sleep schedule. If you are on a bad schedule, MILD and dream incubation chances go down extremely low. So does all LDing really.
Thanks again for a great response, I really appreciate the time you take to answer my ramblings 
. After making this post, I was watching the LaBerge Russia LD videos on youtube, and he said something there that I didn’t read in ETWOLD that answers I think how MILD works: he said that there is a form of memory that is dependent on the state your mind is in at the time. He gave the example of a drunk person being able to find a particular bar only when he’s drunk, and not when sober. The point of the visualization of the dream in MILD is to put your mind into the “dream mode” as much as possible, so that the intention of “The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember to recognize that I’m dreaming” will occur when you’re dreaming, which makes sense.
No problem. That sounds pretty cool. Good luck.