Last week with no effort on my part I had 5 lucid dreams in 3 nights. Recently after, I started trying hard again to reproduce those results. Tedious reality checks, looking around, and almost compulsively imagining myself back in the dream state, exhausting myself

Do I need to just continue doing some reality checks, and some of this, and "gently" think of lucid dreaming and let my mind take its course, or am I trying to hard to force results?

Thanks for your help.