When You Give a Brain a Cookie...
... it'll try for another treat.
I find myself giving this advice to a lot of people, and not just about lucid dreaming (although it's a pretty big help). I figured I would share it in it's own thread, so I have something I can refer back to instead of posting the same thing in over and over. The basic strategy is to treat your brain like you're trying to train a puppy.
If you say "sit" over and over again, and the puppy sits, you give it a treat. Over time, through repetition, the puppy eventually realizes that if you say "sit" and they do, they get a treat. The puppy eventually doesn't need the treat anymore, and will continue to sit on command.
When trying to become lucid, I recommend that people give their brain a cookie for even moderate success. This doesn't have to be a real cookie... although it certainly can be. Basically, you want to do something which will increase your dopamine levels and mentally attach it to the behavior you want repeated. For example:
Remember my dreams: Give myself a big smiling pat on the back and a verbal "good job!"
Just had a lucid dream: Eat my favorite candy (which I have now reserved exclusively for lucid success) and a verbal "way to be lucid!"
Didn't attain lucidity: Wag my finger saying "no cookie for you without first getting lucid!"
Over time, the consistent rewarding of lucidity will release dopamine to help strengthen the neural pathways associated with becoming lucid. It's operant conditioning at it's simplest. Eventually, you can taper down the rewards and move the goalpost. So then you're only giving yourself a cookie when you get a new dream ability, or complete a set task such as TOTM or TOTY. This will encourage your brain to keep chasing those cookies, and your progress will go SO MUCH FASTER!
Now, the thing is, you will likely get a sort of treat for being lucid while you're still asleep. That would be the experiences you have during lucidity. In the beginning, however, those experiences are likely to be short and confusing, so rewards in the waking world will be more important at that stage. As your experience grows, and your lucid dreams are more stable and fantastic, the reward tends to be attached to the behavior performed while lucid rather than lucidity itself. That is, if you learn to fly and that feels good, then the feel-goods reward flying, not being lucid. Because of this, over time, the abilities you once possessed exclusively by virtue of being lucid will begin to bleed into your non-lucid dreams. Somewhat ironically, this makes it more difficult to recognize you're dreaming as being able to do fantastic things becomes more commonplace. This is why it's so important to keep up the reward system for attaining lucidity.
Interestingly, this works for just about anything. My sister uses this for anxiety, and I've even heard of people using this to quit smoking. It's very effective.
