lucid dreaming

I read a technique for lucid dreaming somewhere. The idea was to draw the letter A on your hand, for "Awake", and throughout the day get in the habit of occasionally looking at your hand to see if there's an A there (meaning you're awake). Since it's possible that your hand may also have an A on it in a dream, looking  at your hand is used more as a trigger to remind yourself to assess whether you are awake or dreaming frequently. The idea is that when you dream, you'll also look at your hand, and make this evaluation.

So I tried this, sort of. I didn't draw an A on my hand, but I did imagine looking at my hand to try and assess whether I was awake, and I would occasionally think about this, though mostly right before going to bed -- and ironically I would imagine looking at my hand, and it wasn't clear to me whether I should assess my imagined hand to be a sign of awakeness or dreamness.

Anyway, the other night, in a dream, I did in fact look at my hand with the intent of discerning whether I was dreaming, and I decided I was dreaming, and a strange feeling happened after that, a bit like falling. Then I recall having a brief moment of being consciously aware that I was in a dream, and having some control, and remembering something I wanted to do in my lucid dream, and it seemed that my mind tried to make it happen, but failed and I woke up. That whole time had this weird intense feeling of falling, or something like that.