I'm not a fan of sense focus as defining awareness. That's like classical "ADA", and I think mindfulness is much more important and relevant. It is *self*-awareness that is key, not basic environmental observation. All you need I think is the sense that "*I*...am *here*....*now*".
Which isn't to say I don't look and listen, etc. I do this as part of enjoying my life experience, but I don't place an undue emphasis on the environment, I rather "feel myself" (haha) in the place, in that moment.
I will say that paying attention to visual detail as a habit results in extremely vivid and detailed dreams. So I guess I'm contradicting myself a bit. Some element of really looking at where you are is certainly important. Just not for the awareness part, but as a part of being fully involved in your environment. I hope that's not too confusing!
Like the TYoDaS drill into us: what we need are these things, in sequence: 1) awareness in the moment of experience; 2) awareness in the moment of behavior (response to experience); 3) awareness in the dream state. You start with 1, work to 2, and then finally 3 will come around more and more.
Judge your progress by honestly self-evaluating: do your mindfully control your responses to experience, or do your (mindless) responses to experience control you?
I think location reflection is good. I do it a lot. And I may even revive it to near ADRC status. But that's not the only reflection we need. We should constantly reflect on our experiences, whatever they are, beyond just location.
For example, my 2nd LD came from me dropping a stack of cards and trying to pick them up. I just couldn't, they kept slipping between my fingers and falling back down to the ground. I chuckled to myself and told myself, "this is one of those times you should check to see if you're .... DREAMING! OMG!" That's the sort of thing I'm talking about: keeping a constant eye out for things that are dream-like. Of course, it helps a lot to be really familiar with your dreams, so know the sort of things you're looking for.
Another semi-repeating theme for a while was the inability to count a small collection of objects (billiard balls in particular).
The reason I chose location for an ADRC is that my dreaming locations, other than a few well-established influential places (childhood home mostly, and somewhat more recently, former adult home, interestingly enough, current home only about 3-4 times ever), never take place in waking life locations. They're always made up, imaginary. I think this is a reasonably important pre-requisite for location ADRC. Even though they're made up, they have very common features: steep auditorium seating (lots and lots of these), racquetball/squash/basketball courts, stairways that descend along the perimeter of the walls (square buildings).
For a while I was really looking at trees a lot in dreams. I finally did some daytime MILD on this theme and caught a LD when I found myself again looking at a big impressive dream tree.
Addtionally, I kept a major eye out for all transitions, and on my path when moving. I held in my mind a map of where I came from, and where I'm going to. I got an LD once from noticing that a path that used to be open to me became unexpectedly closed off. Another time, I found myself on a ledge in an outside huge open quarry -- that's not what got me lucid, though: it was the fact that I knew I had just one moment before been somewhere else entirely different.
So location has a number of aspects: the place, of course, but also path and transitions.
transitions never worked out much for me other than that one time, because I don't notice them much in dreams. But maybe, becoming highly sensitive to them would still be valuable.
So if location is something that really resonates with you, I'd say go for it. But keep yourself open for your dreaming tendencies and think about building a waking practice around what you find yourself paying attention to most in dreams.
I also pay attention to contraptions a lot in dreams: locks, faucets, mechanical things, I get up close and really look at them. And, I see (used to, not so much any more) really bizarre highly detailed objcts. That's another example of looking at your dreams and building your waking ADRC to match.
Dreaming tendencies ("dream signs") tend to shift over time. So be open to changing your daytime focus (or secondary focus at least) to match what your dreaming tendencies of the moment are. Having a detailed dream journal is of course pretty important for this.
Hope this helps!
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