Guide to Lucid Dreaming
Preface
Lucid Dreaming is simple. There are many complicated methods and techniques you can find online that will make exceptional claims about their efficacy, but I'm going to tell you what worked for me.
There are 2 prongs to this method. You cannot skip either of them. If you try to use this method to lucid dream while neglecting one of these, you will fail.
1) Get 8 hours of sleep a day.
2) Keep a regular dream journal.
Getting 8 Hours of Sleep
Some people will be pessimistic about their prospects for lucid dreaming, reporting that they "rarely dream." This is technically false. Everybody dreams, you just may not remember them. In my experience, this is highly correlated with a unhealthy lack of sleep, or having enough sleep, but in an inconsistent schedule.
If you have a healthy sleep schedule and still can't remember your dreams, it may be due to something else, such as marijuana use, but there is no way to be sure if it's a deeper issue unless you cross off the easiest solution first. So get enough sleep!
How to Dream Journal
Even if you remember your dreams, they are transient, and flee from you as soon as you wake up. I use a specific thinking structure in order to mitigate this rapid memory loss.
Immediately upon waking, write down the last thing that happened in your dream before you woke up. From there, reverse backwards in your dream as far as you can. (This happened, after ___, which happened, after ___) Visualize the scenes in your mind as you write, picture yourself back in the dream again. This will make your memory more powerful and may cause you to remember more detail.
Dream Signs
Lucid dreaming is a function of your awareness while dreaming. The reason you stumble unaware through your dreams is because you don't know that you're you're dreaming. The reason why you may only rarely or never be lucid is because the idea that it's possible to be aware in your dreams never crossed your mind, or you didn't believe it. Well, duh. So what?
Well, there's a trick we can use in order to make you think about whether you're dreaming or not more often. It's called keeping dream signs. In the process of writing your dream journal, you will inevitably come across recurring characters, situations, and places. No matter how deep you wish to go into analysis of these things, which are so important to your subconscious you constantly dream of them, the fact is clear that they will be very useful in achieving lucidity.
Reality Checks
After a few weeks of dream journaling you will surely have at least a handful of things that tend to occur much more often in your dreams than in waking life. What you do now, is commit them to memory, and commit yourself to performing a reality check every time you see them.
There are many methods for reality checks, but the one I've found most consistent is pinching your nose and trying to breathe through it. For whatever reason you can always breathe through this in dreams. Others include looking at your hands (you tend to be missing or having extra fingers,) reading the written word, looking at clocks, etc. But I find the nose pinch to be the fastest and most reliable.
The important part is simply that you pause whatever you're thinking about for a moment and truly question whether or not you're dreaming. In my experience, most of the time I realized that I was dreaming before the check, and the check only confirmed it. It's very important to truly pause and think about if what you're seeing is real. The habit you want to build is (see dream sign -> question reality), not (see dream sign -> pinch nose and breathe.) If you're too hasty you may form a habit where you do reality checks, but never act on them when they succeed!
Epilogue
I wish you luck on your quest to achieve lucid dreaming! For any futher questions, elaboration, or discussion, I recommend dreamviews.com, which is a nice forum dedicated to this subject.