Hey I'm 16 years old and pretty new to this whole lucid dreaming thing. I've had a few kinda lucid dreams where I realise I'm dreaming but don't do anything or simply wake up :/ Anyways I have a few questions:

1. I've been dream journalling for about 2 months now but I'm struggling to find dreamsigns. Most of my recorded dreams seem to be more general storylines of what happened, rather than specifics like i saw a purple cat etc. The only kinda dreamsigns i can find are more general trends in my dreaming like my parents are usually in them. Is this enough or should i be looking for more specific things in my dreams?

2. I'm trying to do reality checks throughout the day but I'm not sure when i should be doing them. I read on a tutorial somewhere on here that you should only do RCs when something weird or unusual happens, but I tend to forget to do them when i try this. Other places say to do them every 10 mins/hour etc but this seems quite difficult and annoying to me, I guess it depends on whether it really helps that much. When/how often should i be aiming to do RCs as a beginner and how can i remember to do them?

3. I guess I've been mostly trying to achieve DILDs so far, but I've have limited success even though I've put in quite a lot of effort. A couple of weeks ago in the school holidays i tried MILD/WBTB in the early mornings and I feel this helped me quite a lot, giving me a couple of lucids and better recall. The problem is, now I'm back at school I can't really do this or I'll probably be really tired. Also I can't really use an alarm to wake me up at night/early morning because I'd wake up my parents. I do have the weekends i suppose but this is only at most 2 days out of 7, and i feel i need to be consistent rather than just trying at weekends. I guess my question is whether there is a method thats better than simply hoping for a lucid dream (and doing RCs in the day), but that won't impact my sleep much?

Thanks alot if you read all that