Yes, Mindfulness/self-awareness does "work," Obscure.

Practicing daytime selff-awareness is foundational to LD'ing, particularly because a lucid dream is literally the presence of your waking-life self-awareness in a dream. But there is more to do than just that because, as you noted, you must be asleep when having a LD, so you must learn to be awake while you are asleep... and that can indeed be tricky!

There are two forms of transition from wake to lucidity: Dream Initiated Lucid Dream (DILD), where you become lucid during the dream; and Wake Initiated Lucid Dream (WILD), where you hold onto your waking-life self-awareness throughout the falling asleep and entering a dream process. There are many, many techniques for inducing these transitions, like The FILD you mentioned above, or MILD. I suggest you do a little research here at DV, and find what you think will work for you and add that to your mindfulness practice.

For a good baseline, I also humbly suggest that you look at my Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals thread; you might find it useful.

Good luck!