I've had a similar experience, where discrepancies in dream raised consciousness and morphed into lucid dreaming. In time I've become better at working out dreams from reality, and decided reversed to trigger it voluntarily. To bad with age I almost stopped dreaming, it was great.
It might be extremely personal, but my best trigger was imagining walking down an infinite stair above a cloudy sky right before sleeping - imagination transitioning into dreaming as it went. I would regularly misstep and fall - either the body would twitch waking me up, or I'd be falling in the empty below, the impossibility of the situation awakening consciousness in the dream. Had to be timed right tho - too early and would have just been just me imagining things. The feeling of lucid dreaming is distinct enough to tell which is which tho, so I could just attempt it over and over until it worked or I'd miss the window and just feel asleep.