One of the easiest and most common methods of obtaining lucid dreams is reality checks. A reality check is anything you can use to test whether you are dreaming or awake. Popular reality checks include holding your nose closed and seeing if you can still breath, trying to poke a finger through the palm of your hand, counting your fingers and seeing if you get a number other than five, or checking the time more than once and seeing if the numbers change in an illogical way. If things happen the way you would expect (you can't breath with your nose and mouth closed, you can't poke your finger through your hand, you have five fingers on each hand and time progresses linearly), then you're awake. If, however, odd things happen, then chances are you're dreaming.
The idea is to get into the habit of performing a reality check regularly and whenever something seems odd. (My personal favorite is the finger counting reality check; it's easy to do at any point in time, and it doesn't make you look too crazy... at least compared with some of the other ones.) While initially you'll probably just be confirming you're awake, sooner or later your reality test will come up negative.
So if, for example, you find you have six fingers on your right hand, you should realize this means you're in the middle of a dream. If this happens, then by definition you've had a lucid dream! Congratulations! Of course, there are still challenges to overcome from this point, like keeping from getting too excited and waking up, not losing focus and forgetting it's a dream, trying to remember what you wanted to do with the dream in the first place, the skill of dream control itself, etc. But still, it's pretty cool to know you are dreaming at the time, in and of itself, whether it lasts for a moment or the entire dream.
Why does the reality check method work? Well, while we're in the midst of a dream, the logical part of our brain isn't functioning as well as it does when we're awake. A purple unicorn could walk by in a dream, and we may think nothing of it. Or we might think, "huh, that's a bit odd..." then be on our merry way. I can't count the number of times I've thought back on dreams and wondered, "How in the heck did I not realize that was a dream?!" If you're in the habit of questioning what you experience, however, one of those oddities may cause you to wonder and pause just long enough to do a reality check. Then, when the test fails, you know it's a dream. Not because you're thinking clearly and logically, necessarily, just because you've burned it into your brain that having any number of fingers other than five means you're dreaming (or whatever test you've chosen).
Granted, reality checks can be a bit random with their success rates, even with a solid habit. Nevertheless, if you feel like dabbling with the concept of a lucid dream it's an interesting thing to try out. I've had friends I told about the method come back to me with stories of their first lucid dreams, often months later, even though they weren't very serious about trying to get a lucid. They just happened to do a reality check at some point, on a whim almost, and find they were dreaming.
In my mom's case she didn't even have to do a check. She was swimming through the air one day when she suddenly realized it must be a dream. She says it was because dreams had been on her mind a lot when she usually didn't give them much thought, which she attributed to me rambling on about lucid dreaming all the time. One of my friends got a lucid dream the very night after I told her about the finger counting test. In her case I wasn't too surprised. She was known for talking in her sleep and having very good dream recall. Although I have to admit I was a bit jealous; it had taken me weeks of effort to get my first lucid dream.
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