[BlackHoleSun]

Long-time lucid dreamer here. It varies for everyone, but here's a list (in no particular order) of what worked for me:

- Start a dream journal. Make it detailed. If you have problems with dream recall, give yourself about 10-20 minutes when you first wake up to sit there and repeat in your mind over and over and over what you do remember, solidifying it in crisp detail in longterm memory, and then write it down. Be very detailed and descriptive, and pay close attention to how you felt in the dream.

- Study how dreams work physically. Seriously. It helps things make more sense. For example, the emotional centers of your brain are heightened during sleep, while the parts of your brain that regulate behavior show minimal activity, meaning that in your dreams you are completely unfiltered, you don't register crazy stuff as being abnormal, and you are more prone to irrational/odd behavior or extreme emotional states.

- Learn your "dream vocabulary". Don't go looking for what someone else thinks different things mean in dreams. Start asking yourself what YOU associate with these things. For example, if you dream of a turtle, what do YOU think of turtles, what memories do YOU have about turtles -- that is your dream vocabulary, and it's built off your experience, memory, association, and emotional or value judgments you personally carry about your life. This will help you understand and communicate with your own individual subconscious better, which can in turn help you have total control over it.

- Remember that when you try to lucid dream, you basically need to get commands to stick with your subconscious enough to be recalled and acted upon when your conscious brain is dead to the world. This means you will need a lot of repetition and what is essentially self-hypnosis so that things get really lodged in the deeper waters of your mind enough to become basically instinctive responses.

- Don't expect immediate results or get disappointed if nothing happens for a while. You're having to train your own instincts, and that can take time. It took me a few months to start getting results.

- Some suggestions for what kind of training you can use include "reality checks" repetitively during waking life (again, the repetition makes it a habit), where you look around and question whether everything around you is in fact what it appears to be or not

- "Absurdity checks"...paying attention to anything totally out of the norm, seemingly absurd, such as a talking cuckoo bird. Train yourself to respond to absurdity with the understanding that "Toto, we ain't in Kansas anymore..."

- Specific commands/intents. I don't recommend this necessarily until later, but to be fair, it worked well for me, so I can't NOT recommend it either? lol. Basically as you're falling asleep every night you give a specific command. Mine was, "I will fly when I dream". It worked, btw. Flying then gave way to other things, and more and more it became a habit to become lucid and take charge.

- "I will Remember"...technically falls under "specific commands" but is important enough to stand on its own. Enhances dream recall and cognizance during dreams.

Best of luck on your journeys. It's been about 10 years for me doing it on purpose, and a lot of accidental times throughout my life before that, and it's a pretty wild ride. I ended up incorporating a lot of techniques into my energy work, and now have this whole entire paradigm built out of the idea that all of life (waking and sleeping, doesn't matter) is basically "Dreams". "Dreamwalking", "Dreamweaving" and "Dream augmenting" are now some of my best and most favorite tools for magick. <3