Hi, I'm by no means an expert on meditation, more of a beginner really, but I've done enough to experience some benefits. If you're anything like me, my main suggestion would be to put the books down for the time being and just try it. I mean it, put the books down and back away slowly with your hands in the air Think of it like a low pressure experiment on yourself, you're just observing what happens without having too many expectations for a particular result. You might find that the concepts around meditation gradually make more sense the more personal experience you get under your belt - at that point more reading might become useful again. It's okay if meditation seems like a really vague concept at first. It's a new way of going about things.
Maybe the best I can do in terms of providing more detail is to share a little of my own experience in case my beginner perspective is useful. I used to try to meditate once in a blue moon only to feel discouraged because I was "absolutely terrible at it". I was just doing a simple focus on your breathing exercise, where you allow thoughts to flow in and out of your mind, observe them but don't hang onto them or engage with them. I couldn't even go a full minute - I timed it - without forgetting about my breathing and getting completely dragged away by a random train of thought. Oddly I don't have any trouble with focus when it comes to working on more complex tasks, ex. I could work on a difficult math problem for 2 hours straight without getting distracted from it. So this discovery that I couldn't focus on my breathing was pretty disconcerting and frustrating.
In any case, one day it hit me that worrying about not being good at meditation didn't make any sense. The fact that I had a mind that was constantly and stubbornly active, problem solving and analyzing, meant that I could stand to benefit more from the practice than someone who has a natural talent for quieting their mind. That was they key for me; I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to achieve a specific goal and started just observing.
Observed benefits to date: During meditation sessions, usually 5-15 minutes focusing on breathing, I discovered just how habitually active my mind really is and noticed patterns of thought that I wasn't even consciously aware of. I noticed what types of thoughts were most likely to "pull me in". Gradually I started to feel more "space" in between the thoughts, but more importantly I felt more space between myself and the thoughts, like I'm not immediately and automatically invested in them. The biggest change in my daily life has been having more and more experiences where I start to think about something then quickly disengage from it by choice, or start to get upset or anxious about something only to suddenly realize that it's just a story I'm telling myself in my head and that I can choose whether or not I want to believe it. It doesn't feel like effort when this happens, it just feels like happening to be more aware of what's going on in my own mind.
In terms of getting more lucid dreams, perhaps someone with more experience meditating with that intention can provide more feedback (I've taken a long break from actively lucid dreaming and I'm only recently getting back into it). Even so, I imagine just getting a little more "space" between yourself and your thoughts could be enough to get lucid more often. It tends to break the habit of automatically accepting things as fact just because they're there.
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