ADA, as well as most other exercises performed during the day, IMO are not very effective. Below is a comment I posted else where regarding the same subject:

I'm afraid that may rarely be the case. You are welcome to sort through the ADA thread on DreamViews. Most of the so-called success case are nothing more than WBTB triggered incidents, and rarely the users experience consistent results, which is the promise of such techniques.

In 2012 I conducted a survey on the Chinese LD forum, and among thousands of participants and cases collected (many of them practiced ADA, mindfulness, self-reflections, daily RCs, and etc), we had ZERO case of people achieving consistent result through these types of daily routines. Again, nearly all successes, aside from some accidental ones, are based on some form of WBTB!

This is not surprising. Science has shown that during R.E.M. sleep, many brain regions responsible for cognitive functions are either disabled or suppressed. This results in the following:

1. Lack of short term memories. A person who is dreaming rarely remembers the true events that have happened prior to sleep.

2. Reduced comprehension, reasoning, logic and so on.

3. Habits developed during the day are hardly present. For example, how often do we check our mobile phones in a dream?

4. Low level of self-awareness. Most of the time we are just a puppet of our subconscious mind.

This is by no means a comprehensive and accurate list of what's happening during our dreams, but you get the idea. One can train herself to be as aware and mindful as possible, but that doesn't change the fact that when the corresponding brain regions are disabled, none of these will work. By the same token, a Nobel prize winner isn't going to be any more analytical than an average person when dreaming.

Through WBTB, many of these brain regions are activated. Now things start to make a difference. This is why a lot of lucid dreams happen without warning -- all of a sudden we know we are dreaming, for no reason. It's actually a simple explanation: dreams are filled with oddities, you don't need to be a genius to spot them, as long as your cognitive functions are operating! Do you need to be exceptionally aware in order to spot them? No, you don't. You just need your basic level of cognitive functions!

To sum it up: for lucid dreams to occur, it is important that we wake up our brain first. There are many studies on this so I won't elaborate again. I suggest you to read the research from Dr. Ursula Voss whose findings are this subject is particularly interesting.