I discovered this just the night before and it struck me as so logical. I've practiced it off and on many times and have usually gotten immediate results with lucidity whenever I've tried it.

Meditation.

What is meditation, essentially? It's the practice of waking lucidity. In the most basic sense, it's just a tool to get you to stop living in your head with what ifs, what should be, past and future thoughts and worries, and to just FOCUS on what you perceive right now in this moment, with what's really there around you. Nothing else.

As Stephen LaBerge said, your waking mind habits tend to become your sleeping mind habits, so if you practice becoming aware of the present moment while awake, you'll also become more aware while dreaming. It's way more profound than just random dream reality checks, though. Those can still become a part of lazy, habituated thinking, while you fail the tests and ignore the dream signs. Meditation is a much more general, holistic, mind shifting approach that can only make everything about unlocking lucid dreams so much easier.

For example, the other night I went to bed really early at 7pm (because I was tired as hell after work), slept until 2am, then woke up with some strange anxiety, so I decided to meditate. After about a good half hour of different meditation methods (I've also gotten good results on just a few minutes of meditation), I went back to bed and fell back asleep almost immediately. I had a dream that I was in my grandparents' basement where my grandpa was telling other people what to do as they walked around back and forth, when I very quickly realized that my grandpa passed away, so he couldn't be alive right now and this is obviously a dream.

Once I became lucid, though, I hit another common challenge for me: dream control and staying in the dream. This one is probably even tougher than getting lucid to begin with. I decided to have no expectations, no striving for a certain outcome, and just notice the sensation of walking up the stairs out of the basement, feeling it as real as possible. As it became more vivid to me, I slowly started to try floating a bit above the steps, and then gliding above the second flight of stairs to the kitchen. It was dark outside, so I tried looking at my face in the reflection of the kitchen window, but it was dark and vague. I turned to look at my mom's face, but it was also dark and vague, the same as the others, and the dream faded into complete darkness.

At this moment I was now suddenly intensely aware of sleep paralysis. It really freaked me out, so I gathered all of the strength in my body to prepare and then bolt myself out of its grip and wake up. I'm always terrified of sleep paralysis. It's hard to shake that off and trust that I won't get horribly unpleasant hallucinations or something, but I'll keep practicing.

I'm by no means an expert at either meditation or lucid dreaming, though I have more experience with lucid dreaming, but even when I practice a little bit of meditation once in a blue moon I suddenly end a dry spell just like that. I wanted to share this epiphany with you all.

Another thought I've had about this: I wonder if natural lucid dreamers (the ones who are lucid every single night or almost that often) are generally more wired to be aware of the present moment than most? More in tune and focused during waking life? Let me know your thoughts on this.