I haven't been into lucid dreaming for a while, but I used to use a technique called SSILD that worked great for me. Search for that name and you'll find discussions about it. You basically cycle between (with your eyes shut) "do I see anything abnormal?", "do I hear anything abnormal?" and "do I feel anything abnormal?" and just keep cycling between those, trying not to actually think about them too hard as you are falling asleep. If you're lucky, you'll end up transitioning into a dream straight from waking consciousness (wake induced lucid dream or WILD technique) or, failing that, you will fall asleep and have a much better chance or realizing you are dreaming (dream induced lucid dream or DILD), and failing that if you wake up in the middle of the night you can stay awake for a short while and then go back to sleep and have a good chance to fall into a dream you can become awake in (wake back to bed or WBTB) and if you do end up having a lucid dream and you wake up if you stay still you might just fall back into it (dream exit induced lucid dream or DEILD).
I had quite a few lucid dreams using this technique, but it has a drawback that you end up having "false awakenings" where you think you just woke up but are actually still dreaming. I've had 7 or 8 of those in a row before. If you have a good reality test (my go-to was holding my nose closed and seeing if breathing lightly would still work) then they are kind of nice because now you have just become lucid again and go do whatever you want.
The whole thing got to be too mentally exhausting for me and I was not feeling refreshed when I woke up so I stopped doing it. I occasionally try to start it up again, but I haven't had the gumption to continue it for very long.
As you can see, there is a huge rabbit hole you can fall down if you look into this stuff, and a lot of places on the internet where people discuss it or give pointers.
Also different people have better luck with different techniques. This one just happened to be my thing, I guess.
I had quite a few lucid dreams using this technique, but it has a drawback that you end up having "false awakenings" where you think you just woke up but are actually still dreaming. I've had 7 or 8 of those in a row before. If you have a good reality test (my go-to was holding my nose closed and seeing if breathing lightly would still work) then they are kind of nice because now you have just become lucid again and go do whatever you want.
The whole thing got to be too mentally exhausting for me and I was not feeling refreshed when I woke up so I stopped doing it. I occasionally try to start it up again, but I haven't had the gumption to continue it for very long.
As you can see, there is a huge rabbit hole you can fall down if you look into this stuff, and a lot of places on the internet where people discuss it or give pointers.
Also different people have better luck with different techniques. This one just happened to be my thing, I guess.