Yes, if you happen to wake up after a few hours of sleep, stay up for a couple of hours, and then go back to sleep you are a lot more likely to have a lucid dream. It is called REM rebound.
Studying your hands or watch is training yourself to notice dream signs. That is noticing that something isn't quite right while you are dreaming which makes you become conscious that you are dreaming.
I was dreaming once that I was in a small village where I currently live and as I was walking back to my car I notice that it was my old beat up VW that I own when I was in my 20's. It made me question what it was doing here and all of a sudden I became conscious that I was dreaming. I then walk over to my old car and got in the driver's seat and started to adjust the rear view mirror. When I turned the mirror to show my face I was amazed to see that I looked like I used to look when I was in my 20's. I remember thinking at the time, dam, look at my face. Not too long after that I woke up.
I think that LaBerge has a newer book that comes with a CD that I saw at amazon. I don't actively try to have LD's. They just happen sometimes and I found that they are connected to sleep paralysis as OBE's are also. I just have nice vivid dreams most of the time now. I still try to look for meaning at times as Freud and Jung thought that dreams are our unconscious trying to convey certain psychological truths to our consciousness.
I see a connection between psychosis and lucid dreams. In a schizophrenic episode our consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious and we are like Jung stated, living in a waking dream. In a lucid dream it is like our consciousness take a trip to the land of the unconscious. To me it is kind of an opposite direction thing to that of a psychotic episode.