I mentioned it that there are a bunch of methods but I just mentioned the two that helped me the most.

Wanted to keep things simple.

I didn't like the alarm one. That in particular, seems like it would mess with my head more since it's disrupting sleep.

And I didn't notice any difference when I used it.

There were a bunch of methods I tried, but most ranged from impractical to irritating, I didn't want it to disrupt my life too much.

The dream journaling and reality testing was simple and resulted in fairly rapid awareness of my dreams.

That does sound tough, not being able to distinguish dreams from reality.

I had a really cool one where I was like ninja flipping around a mall sliding down jumping off escalator handrails fighting these zombie dogs.

That was pretty rad.