So last night I had a dream with two things in it that should have let me become lucid. The first was that I looked in a mirror and my face was deformed and pretty scary looking. I read that this is a common dream sign and I was looking for dream signs throughout the day so that I would catch on in a dream. Then later in the dream, my stomach felt kind of weird (because it did in real life when I woke up) and I remember thinking "hmm I didn't know you could feel queasy in a dream". So I knew that I was in a dream, but that didn't seem to phase me at all. I just continued on with what I was doing. How can I make it so that if I notice a dream sign or I realize that I'm in a dream, I actually become lucid?

Unrelated question: When people say they had X dreams in one night, does that count dreams that happen in the same cycle? i.e. if you have a dream that turns into another dream completely unrelated to the first, does that count as two dreams or one?