Growing out of old trusted reality checks! any suggestions?

A few months ago I came to the point were whenever I would get enough sleep to have decent dream recall (like maybe once or twice a week) I could recall at least one lucid dream. At that point I was sure enough of my ability to go lucid that I stopped frequenting this board.

I had usually been using the reality check of looking at my hands. It worked in my very first RC induced lucidity, where my hands looked completely wrong (mainly because I was used to looking at them to decide if my reality was a dream or not). For the couple months, looking at my hands seemed to work as an RC, with something different being wrong whenever I looked at them.

But as time went on, I found it took more time looking at them with deeper thought and closer examination to decide if I was dreaming. On a couple of instances I decided I wasn’t after my traditional examinations, such as counting the fingers and generally just asking myself ‘could this be a dream’ didn’t work. So I began using a technique I heard of on this board, attempting to stick my finger of one hand through the palm of my opposite hand. This worked for a while, but then I found myself in dream situations with very low-lucidity where I convinced myself prior that it wouldn’t go through and it didn’t, despite the fact that I actually was in a dream.

So I began using digital clocks… with my first experience, each clock I looked at turned off immediately. Other times, the time on the clock would rapidly change. Then after using this RC a few times, I found myself needing to remember what time the clock said, looking away, then looking back to see if the next time was possible. Eventually, the next time always become pretty possible (like 10:00 changing to 10:01), but after doing it a few times it became obvious that I was dreaming.

But recently it has all seemed to real in that sense. The clock will read the same for many times that I look at it. My finger won’t go through my palm. My hand looks pretty much the same as it should, even when examined pretty closely. I feel I have outgrown my old trusty RCs. Maybe I just need to try and concentrate a lot harder when I RC when I am awake… regardless, I keep missing chances at lucidity because of this. Over the last couple weeks the only LD I’ve been able to have had just occured instantaneously, without RCing. But I’ve missed out on so many more.

Has anyone out there who has been LDing for a while now experienced this? If so, have you found any solutions?

P.S. - I just wanted to mention that I’m very grateful to this site and the people on this message board for helping me to gain the ability to LD!! Before I came here I had only one brief experience with dream lucidity, now it has reshaped the way I see the world! Thank you all for your thoughts and ideas!