3 out of 4 LD have now been within the routine of going to bed later than I wanted, getting up around 6 or 7 to get people out the door, then going back to bed. I usually have an hour before I really have to get up for the day. It takes awhile to get back to sleep, but then I have a LD. If this seems to be the formula for success, I will keep practicing.

However, it does not happen everytime I follow the formula, so I guess there's no guarantee.

This was the first time in coming into lucidity that I was in the midst of a dream and questioned the story then did a reality check.
This should help me be more motivated during the day to do a RC more often.

I tell the whole story in my handwritten journal so I won't recount it all here. But the big picture was that teenagers were causing mischief around the house. I was hiding from them, and had the thought that this might be a dream. I did the RC, realized it was a dream and then for some reason wanted to continue the storyline a bit, but just change how I was participating. I wanted to fly, of course. I just love flying in LD.

So I flew around sabotaging more marauding teens and men. The lands morphed from my parent's neighborhood to Mexico or India. I had some of them chase me, fire weapons at me and then I found and recovered my baby that I had been searching for earlier in the dream. Then I became mentally exhausted when I got back to the house and didn't want to face more mischievous teens, so I decided to just wake up and end the dream.

After pondering the dream, and pondering the physical world, I wonder just how much control I really have. And in the dream, even tho I was lucid, I still felt compelled to continue the mission, to have an adventure, to accomplish something. I'm sure that much of the time in the physical world I go around accomplishing stuff and feel busy and productive and not enough time being mindful that its just another layer of a dream and things might be more concrete, but still not real.

I'm not lucid enough in the physical world.

I'm wondering if it's more beneficial to keep practicing skills and doing tasks in the dream world to stabilize control, or if I should practice stopping the action and just seeing how long I can "do nothing" in a LD.