I always return to SSILD....it has become my comfort zone for lucidity. I find that the body awareness is the most important part for me....when I have strong body awareness I get my best lucidity. I theorize that in the dream I am maintaining a thread of contact with my real body that is back in my bed and that is triggering memory which is, in turn, triggering stronger lucidity.

From reading your post it seems as though this might be what you are missing. Your sleeping body may be the familiar ground that you are missing. Try working on your timing for SSILD so that you stay close enough to sleep and can still do the body part of the cycle.

I have experimented with a lot of subtle changes to the classic SSILD protocol and I find that I do best when I go back to that exact protocol.