Well presented.

I have practiced a form of Yoga ADA (present moment awareness) on and off for about 10 years (mostly off), but mainly as you put it, for paying attention and as a means to balance out my natural tendency to dream even while I am awake. It is difficult to say how much this has helped as far as lucid dreaming is concerned because I practiced it alongside my own version of Dream Yoga, which is essentially self awareness, and not general environmental awareness.

That said, I agree with just about everything you have said. I think it is probable that many people who have had success with ADA are actually including in it a lot of self awareness without calling it such; making it lean more in this or that direction.

I have found general awareness to be very useful for things like when I am out in public (being on guard),when speaking to others (internal awareness), etc. These things have their obvious benefits in other aspects of lucid dreaming, such as visualization, clarity, stability, and concentration for techniques, but without the discriminating mind they might not have much effect when it comes to gaining lucidity within the dream itself.

Personally, I have had much success with Dream Yoga, basically my version of this has replaced my "ADA" time with a constant will to know which reality I am in and to watch for anything unusual or dreamlike; so in that sense I am always looking for trouble, remembering who I am, where I am, what my dream signs are, and so forth. I do not do this for the entire day (and I have a difficult time believing that anyone but monks do), but it is for several hours in total some days, and only a few hours on other days. Sometimes a DC will convince me that I am crazy and everything is normal, but I find more often than not that really unusual things do not go unnoticed.

I look forward to this thread developing, we may all learn a great deal and save a lot of time and frustration because of it.