I searched and didn’t find this, so I apologize if this has been talked about or if I’m stating the obvious 
For getting an LD or accomplishing a goal, positive reinforcement should go a long way in increasing success.
It’s true that lucid dreaming is its own reward, but a little more motivation can’t hurt. How do you reward yourself IRL?
All I’ve come up with is food/candy. 
My reward would be the satisfaction when I write the dream down in the morning. Plus all the positive thoughts during the day.
Interesting… as its something I have been giving a lot of thought myself?! (not to say just because I think about it, therefore its interesting! )
As this is a type of classical conditioning type scenario, the reward should come straight after the behavior in order for the conditioning to be successful. Recent neuro-psychological research in learned behavior tends to show that after positive reinforcement, neuro-chemicals are released into the brain that help strengthen the newly learned behavior. (By which I mean, the chemicals help strengthen the newly created neural pathways that represent (so to speak) the conditioned behavior). Repetition helps with the strengthening process, and just like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets! This discovery lead to the development of learning software, that in its own way, rewarded children through play and positive reinforcement, and children were learning at a rate (of something like 20%) more than their peers who were not using such software.
Which gave me the idea, why can we not make a game that teaches you to become lucid? I even dreamt the other night about my brother playing a game in Virtual Reality - the game sucked, but I had the idea in the dream that this would be an excellent way to learn to LD! If it were true that just having a LD would be a reward in itself, then you would notice a gradual trend in having more and more LDs. I don’t believe this is the case.
But I don’t think the goal is to learn to lucid dream per se, but to learn to become critically aware of our environment, to question our reality, and perform a standard reality check. The problem in sleep, is that the areas of our brain responsible for critical awareness and executive functioning reside in the frontal lobes, and these are normally not active in sleep (in some people’s cases… they are not even active when they are awake! 
) It is speculated (by myself for one) that its these areas that become more active during a LUCID dream, and allow us to think and actively take part in a dream - rather than the sublime ‘sit back and be washed along’ as the dream plays itself out.
My idea is to reward yourself during the day after each successful attempt to check your reality, developing the behavior of being critically aware of our environment (isn’t that just Lucid Living?). By also rewarding this behavior, it will develop faster and stronger and hopefully, in our sleep, give our pre-frontal cortex a kick start so we are lucid in the dream state.
I am sure software could be developed in the form of a game where every time during the game you successfully ascertain that you are in a dream you get points, and by collecting points (rewards) you then progress to the next level (reward again!) I have asked around some people I know who might be able to help develop such software… but nobody is too interested. Any takers here?
OK… that has been a post in me for quite some time now… glad to get it out!
Carnun, great thoughts. I think the Software thread may have something close to what you’re describing.