Character Assisted Lucid Dreaming...CALD part VIII

Hey there Jeanx. I actually used CALD quite a bit when I first started out. Instead of creating my own character, I chose the Second Doctor (the non-evil version of my avatar :tongue:). I basically would daydream about having conversations with him as I was falling asleep. Over time, his responses seemed to get more and more independent, as in I wasn’t having to make up what he was saying and some answers took me by surprise.

The next step to CALD would actually be having this DC (or MC as CALDers seem to prefer saying for Mind Character) come to you in a dream and then making you lucid. I never got to that point, but I have met and still meet The Doctor frequently in my LD’s. I kind of let CALD go, but the character development that he got has made him very interesting in dreams.

If you want to try, the best thing to do is to make or pick an MC and to try having those conversations. If at first it’s difficult, writing out a script instead can help, as well as participating in the Character Chats in the playground.

For more explanation and personal experience, check back on the CALD topic. It’s a lot of reading, but a lot of good info.

I was trying to reply, but the topic got moved and when I went to preview the post, I had to start all over. Waah. (Still, apparently Rhawin can type a lot faster than I can if you moved the post AND typed all that) :wink:

Sorry about that :shy: :tardis:

Ahem

Anyways, I can’t say I’ve actually had a CALD yet, but the the whole character thing is so great, I really feel like I accoplished something anyway. I’d really suggest you give it a try if it sounds fun to you!

For me, I can’t really focus well on a single thought for very long, so progress was (and sort of is) sort of slow, like maybe a few weeks, but I’m pretty happy with my 2 characters, even if I don’t consider them absolutely 100% done.

See, at first, just talking to Chilam (my first character, since I assume no-one could figure that out :tongue: ) felt sort of cool, because it was something new, yet fun. during one of my first nights talking to her (night’s when I focus better. Less excitement, I guess), I even sort of sang her name in my head over and over again, just so I didn’t distract myself. We’ve come a long way since, but it was fun.

Chilam and Scout actually came from and under-developed book I was considering writing when I was a little younger (it would’ve probably been terible, now that I think about it), and they were under-developed characters in it. I sort of liked them, so I brought them back up, and added to them, and here’s what I have now:

. . . Uh, actually, it might be best to see them in action at the Character Chats thread, but yes, I think they’re good characters! You like to write, right? Maybe you have a few characters of your own that you like? If you do (or even if you don’t and have to make one up), use him/her/it! For me, it felt like I basicaly may as well have been talking to my hand and puppeting answers at first, it really does come together! One thing that makes CALD so great is that it’s even fun in the daytime! It has even more uses than just LDing! Order yours today! Only 9.95 plus shipping and handaling

CALD is what almost every dream i have is based upon, if you read my signature it says “our DJ and Our Dream-scape” This is because of me and my CALD character hanging out in almost every dream i have. As for him actually helping me achieve lucidness? well ive never really tried. But it may work, if not you will have a awesome person to hang out with in your dreams.

Best of luck to you in CALD and LD’ing

:notify:

The Gecko has an idea: now that this thread is on the first page, he will post some of his own problems. Then, he will lure the other CALD users into their computer rooms with wheels of cheese, and glue the doors shut, thus forcing them to reply to his questions. Of course that’s assuming they don’t call for help or just do something else on the computer

What’s a helpful BlueGecko post without a dumb question post (also by BlueGecko) below it? :tongue:

Okay, so let’s see here. . . . Now that I’ve made myself look like a knowledgable CALD user, I need to figure a question to ask to break the illusion. . . .

:wizard: I need a little help not immeatedartryvbreilphooey instantly getting distracted when trying to speak with (and thus further develop) my characters. That’s why, after so long, I still don’t consider either of them 100% developed (and also the reason why there would be a bit more of a gap between this pargraph and the last if this post were read in real time). I just can’t focus on them.

In the day, when I’m not doing anything, I’m usually on my couch, using my laptop. There, there seems to be to many distractions, what with my brother talking on Skype with our friends and all.

If I went into another room, though, there almost seems to be to little distractions. Like I’m waiting for something to happen or whyever it is I can’t concentrate. If they were a bit more capable of think freely, I recon they might better be able to help me with not getting distracted (often by nothing but a random thought), but for now, when I try to focus on them, my mind just wanders around in circles awhile, then if it doesn’t figure out what it’s supposed to be doing, starts going on about random stuff. Any advice?

Hopefully you guys know what I mean and, you know, actually read this whole thing. I’d understand if you didn’t. Now since I can’t think of any spectacular way to end this post, I shall place a smiley of a guy flying with palm tree leaves

:fly:

Hmmm… I usually focused on my character as I was going to sleep when I would daydream normally. My mind was usually a bit clearer then, and I actually used him to quiet my mind from time to time. If I couldn’t focus, he’d say things like “excuse me, I’m still talking” and whatnot to get to focus back on him. It actually worked pretty well, and still does when I’m having a hard time going to sleep.

Now, where is my wheel of cheese?

Thanks, guys! Okay, so either I don’t have a serious medical condition keeping me from speaking easily to my characters, or I’m not the only one here who has it. :tongue:

Okay, now to get my characters to prod me when I get distracted- Ooh! The couch! I haven’t sat on that one all day! In fact Other nonsense

Chilam (MC): Um… yoohoo? Gecko?

Me: Oh - uh . . .right . . . YES! It worked! I’m a genious! My brain is bigger than most people’s houses!

Okay, so yeah. Guess I’ll keep working on that, then. Thanks for the help!

Oh, and, about the cheese: I’m out of it. I do have some stale snacks, though. I’ll have to give you those instead.

Er… so it would appear that that works for you… just keep it up and it will really help your MC develop :razz:

Yep. ahem I got a little lost on my way here. : ]
So, would I be able to have my daemon(like in the Golden Compass but a DC/MC/conscience)guide me to lucidity?
He’d like a chance to whack me over the head. Renny: You bet I would!

I guess it is… ^^
Is there much of a difference between talking to them to distract the mind while the body falls asleep and having them tell you while your dreaming(the RC way)?

I’ve been interested in CALD for awhile, but my main obstacle is figuring out what type of character to use. The people I frequently dream of are friends IRL, and I don’t want to use them. Should I use a pre-existing character? Or create a new entity? I realize that there is no definate answer, but suggestions would be nice :tongue:

Thanks, Leijona! I just wasn’t sure HOW developed the character should be, because I thought a good deal of it was getting to know the character. And thanks for the link! :happy:

Warning: This is a Question Post. If you do not wish to help, then press the back button as quickly as you can. :help:

Anyone else have a strange paranoia [spelling?] about talking with your characters around other people? As if everyone else can read your mind? Cough Then buy my product now! cough

Ahem Even when I do try to talk to my characters around other folks, they’re sort of automaticaly silenced, even if I’m not really doing anything, and I’d actually like to talk.

. . . Guess that’s about it. O Great Grand CALD Thread, do you have any advice? :help: Might post again later

Hmm… I can’t say I’ve had issues with worrying about what other people think, but I really do tend to get distracted with others around. It’s hard to pay attention with so many other things going on around at the same time.

Ah, I suppose it’s more some sort of instinct than fear. Like some sort of law they passed a long time ago (for some reason or other), that’s basically obsolete, but you still get in trouble for breaking it.

Like if I went down an old trail in the middle of nowhere on my bike, that hasn’t been used in 9001 years. And they had a law where youd can’t ride your (then Flintstone-esqu) bike down it. But I rode down there and then a police man jumped out from behind a tree and said “Dude, you can’t ride your bike down here.” And I said “But no-one’s been here in 9001 years!” And then . . . crud, I’m starting to rant randomly like Tobuscus. :shy:

Anywho, I suppose the situation I’m thinking of is more kind of stuck with other people and not really talking to eachother, rather than, say, speaking to your friends at your favorite hang-out. I have a lot more time in the former situation than the latter. :sad: Eh, I suppose that’s the reason I’m asking.

End of post goes here

Okay, thanks! I did ask my characters that, but they said it wasn’t really their fault. See, I kind of have something, more of an idea than a character, called the Firewall. It’s not sentient, it’s more just there to represent a more annoying part of my SC , and to give everyone something to yell at when my characters can’t really show up (Since there isn’t really any other sort of object I can blame for this kind of stuff).

. . . Yup, that’s all I can remeber that I was going to post. OUTRO OF DARKNESS!

Okay, now I should REALLY head over to the Character Chats thread now.

Hey how is everyone? I last posted in this thread in 2009. Things had been busy for me the past 2 years or so but I’m back? :grin: Just a quick recap, my two main characters are Desmond (Had him since I was 9) and Sen(AKA Thunzar…he changed his name xD…had him since I was 14) . I’m still in touch with them but more of Sen x3 Sen have greatly turned from a bad tempered and wild dude into somewhat a milder gentleman. Its kinda amazing how characters change as time goes by. I don’t see them much in my dreams but yes, they still serves as my protectors :razz:

I had a nightmare a few months back and I panicked which made me screamed for Sen. No sooner had I did that, I was enveloped in a tight hug which calms me down a lot (complete with that warm fuzzy sensation of being hugged). Well the rest of my dream which ended quickly was spent wondering if my nightmare ended since I can barely see anything but the patterns of his sweater. Have you guys ever felt that even though that random person in your dream doesn’t resemble your characters but you just instinctively know its them? I had a dream recently where someone grabbed my wrist and wouldn’t let me run and then another man jogged up and grabbed my other wrist tugging me forward. Even though he looked nothing like Sen, I just got that feeling that tells me its him. Its kinda hard to describe that feeling…but its good :smile:

A pleasure reading what you guys posted :smile: Talon Arana haven’t been on much right? :confused:

checks in on the CALD thread :woo: Many postings! (really should have been checking in more often instead of just hanging around the chats)

Hey there Melody, long time no see! Good to see that Thunzar and that other guy whose name I forgot are still around. :content:

The last time Talon Arana was logged in was sometime back in March IIRC

EDIT: steps out of time machine Hang on, this post really didn’t make much sense. I would’ve realized this sooner, but Murphy’s Law dictated that I would stop being able to connect to LD4All and that I would eventually forget about it. But since I remembered . . . KA-EDIT! By the way, for any Mod who wants to keep track of my Permanent Record Cue lightning strike in the background, this is the post where I broke the copyright rules because of stupid ignorance.

. . . Wait, if I end this post now, I’ll cause a time paradox. Hm, what did I basically say that played a role in the following conversation? . . . Oh yeah, something like “By the way, you did ask Neila how she feels about the whole situation, right? A dumb question but I had to ask.” Except with slightly more copyright.

Congratulations on meeting your characters again. An MC, at least in my experience, is usually very forgiving, but there is a line beyond which they will stop putting up with you. I think this is based partially off where their patience is and how upset with yourself you are about forgetting about them. I experienced this with my character, Crystal, recently. She started being really willing to talk with me and help me, and I kept forgetting about her, so she finally got upset with me and told me not to talk to her again until I had time for her. I think things will settle down and return to normal for you, though.

[/i]Sorry for not posting A LOT earlier, but my invisibility cloak was stuck on lurk mode. What? Laziness? No, no, that’s silly. When have I ever been lazy? Well, I’m here now (meaning: if I don’t get laz-- cough don’t get kidnapped by an evil robot, I should be here awhile. Audience groans) But first a spoiler from our sponsor (you won’t miss anything by skipping over it):

[spoiler]Yeah, sorry about breaking the rules in the other post. That wasn’t the finest example of my supercomputer-like intelligence. Actually, that last post wasn’t that great in general. I probably had a point, but I think I kind of forgot about it by the time I finished posting, because I was probably pretty sleepy if I posted something like that. Messing up is just a natural talent of mine. Actually, wait. The aliens brainwashed me. Yes, that is the real explanation. Well, don’t want this to drag on forever. Bottom line is, perhaps I ought to edit that so that it’s actually, eh, you know, not dumb?[/spoiler] And now on with the show!

Recently, I read through the entire CALD thread. I learned there was once a time when posts on this thread were frequent. There were lots of posts to read, and peace reigned. (Also, Talon, I learned that I wasn’t giving you nearly enough credit. Sorry. . . .) (Actually, I need to give quite a lot of the people who were here before me more credit!)(Credit sound effect) Anywho, I thought it would be sort of neat if there was a more constant stream of posts here. I then decided, why not start with me posting here more? (Hopefully without as many dumb questions or copyrighted links). After giving a dramatic speech that changed the lives of millions, I decided to type up a status report.

[center]* * *
A Status Report

    • *[/center]

clears throat So yeah, this here’s a status report. You want to here about my characters, right? Audience groan and shake their heads What? Have you seen this one before? Er, let’s just dive in here, shall we?

Scout: She hasn’t been around as much as before. Actually, she’s spent a lot of time exploring my mindscape (which is apparently a rather wacky place, seeing as how there’s not much realism, with floating ? blocks are all over the place and the like). Actually, once she came back with gold (or rather, dead-grass colored, but gold sounds nicer :tongue: ) angel wings on her back. Not like I randomly said “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Scout had angel wings” but rather, when she came back from her trip, my mental image of her just changed. Actually, there’s kind of a weird story to go with it, but I’m kind of trying to keep this brief, so I won’t post it now. Beside, although weird, the story’s actually not that interesting.

The Unnamed LD-301: A MC that was both born and retired in the time frame between this this post and the last. See, an LD-301 is a type of robot from the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. If you are wondering, the LD in the name doesn’t have anything to do with lucid dreaming and probably stands for Lanayru Desert (an area in the game). Now for the character itself, since this is why you’re reading this paragraph and not skipping to the next one: See, I got this idea that it might sort of cool to have an LD-301 for a MC, but then I decided maybe not. I wasn’t completely confident that Scout and Snowbird were 100% complete (yeesh, I take a long time with these things), and since I wasn’t giving them nearly as much attention as I ought to have been, I figured a new MC could set us even further back. Still, I decided to tell Snowbird about this concept, and she decided she liked it. Then, something like following conversation occurred: "Yeah, okay, but I don’t think I should try to imagine it just yet because–" Tosses monkey wrench over shoulder"Done!" “Greetings, master [BlueGecko].” So then I had an LD-301 following me that had no name, and not much personality (sure, it’s a robot. But even in Skyward Sword, they are shown to be capable of emotion and personality). Now, it’s not that I didn’t want to fix it up, but I still felt like I needed to give more attention to Snowbird and Scout, as well. Eventually, I realized that I just wasn’t giving it a lot of focus, so I decided that for the time being, it would probably be happier as just sort of a dream character than a mind-character. The last I saw of it, it was hovering down to the lower mindscape, wearing sunglasses and holding a briefcase. It said for itself that it sees this as a vacation.

And last but not least, we have Snowbird: She spends a lot of time up in the top layer of mindscape, there’s kind of a weird story with her: Ahem Once upon a time, I decided to read through the CALD thread. But it had kind of a weird effect on me: it made me feel motivated to talk to my characters, sure, but it also made me feel kind of disappointed in myself, since I still felt like my characters weren’t 100% complete even after all this time. But no-one was more effected by that mindset than Snowbird: She was pretty upset by it for a while. She complained quite a bit, and even seemed a bit depressed at times (though not always, sometimes she was her normal self, but she often seemed pretty upset. Though I tried to get out of the “I’m-a-Failure” mindset, I couldn’t quite do it (though in retrospect, it seems like it would have been pretty simple without what happened next), but then, Snowbird had a weird idea: See, one time I was trying to help her feel better (now at this point, you’re probably facepalming at my incredible talent for not doing things right), but that wasn’t gonna happen. Then, Snowbird had a weird idea (oh wait, I just said that): “Hey, I know! Give me another name for a moment. I’m going to re introduce myself.” Well, I thought, sure, why not, and decided to name her the first thing that came to mind (I figured this wouldn’t be too serious). Said thing was “Phenac”, after Phenac City from Pokemon Colosseum (Yeah, that instead of some normal name). So then, as she said, she re-introduced herself. "Hello, I’m Phenac. I’m probably one of the weirdest people you’ll ever meet! :grin: " [color=blue]"Hello, :wink: Phenac :wink: , nice to :wink: meet :wink: you.[/color] I thought this would be some weird thing that would be so weird it would fix our problem. It was, but it wasn’t just that: Snowbird actually gave herself amnesia, and now thought she should be called Phenac. She got her memory back, after maybe a week or 2 though. But before then, she was actually resiting[i] getting her memory back, because she liked feeling a like new person. Well, that whole thing was sort of amusing, I sort of wish I had a few conversations written down, but I usually don’t write them down anyway.

Gee, I feel tired now! There are a few more stories that I guess I’ll post tomorrow* Audience groans but the sooner I get to bed, the sooner I’ll wake up and notice all the typos and things I didn’t explain very well. EDIT: There’s one already.

*Translation: Tomorrow means several Earth-years later.

Later… :ack: So much for tomorrow. It hasn’t even been 1 year! Ack, if everyone hates me, I really can’t blame them. Huh. Yeah, so see how I said that even recently my characters haven’t been finished? Well, yeah. That’s sort of a thing with me. Progress has been slow in general, but one thing I always do, is never think of any of my work as 100% complete, and thus I always think it’s gonna take forever to finish it, and therefor, I don’t put a lot of effort into it. (That just applies to things of my own creation, of course.) I suppose also I might have been set back recently by the realization that I still hadn’t covered 5.3% of ground. I, of course, saw that number as 53%, so of course, that was kind of the number I was bumped back to.

But, to be honest, my characters’s responses (especially those of Snowbird, who had the most screen time recently) have been a lot more automatic than I ever thought they’d be. Before, I felt like I was still kind of using a bit of personal brain power (wait, I actually have that? :tongue: ) to generate the replies. But I figured that that was mostly how it was supposed to be (my feeling of “not being done with them” was more based towards the fact that I couldn’t usually focus on them very well and that stuff). But now, their responses are much more automatic than that! (To put this in perspective, you’ve been character chatting with a newb for quite awhile :bored: ) Also, I used to be able to know what they were going to say an instant before they said it, and while that still happens sometimes, they actually manage to throw a response that I wasn’t specifically expecting quite a lot. Man, I feel pretty lame, seeing as how throughout most of the CALD thread, there’re lots of post that, to someone like me, seem to say “I’m so good at character creation, I had a fully automatic character, before I even had a character!” [/Tobuscus voice] Well, worded like that, it sounds like anyone who would’ve said that would have schizophrenia, but I’m sure you know what I mean. :tongue:

And, my sort-of excuse for not being on this thread like a month ago, is, well, you know how in one post I basically said I thought was mostly done, then did a 180 and said I didn’t feel like my characters were developed at all? Well, I actually sort of did feel like both those thing at once, and was kind of reluctant to post on the CALD thread (or a lot on the character chats) because, well, I wasn’t sure where I was on the board myself. Still, I reckon I deserve to be pelted with stones anyway.

Er, well, I guess that’s my overly long post. I suppose it’s finish, unless I ever get over this headache so I can really proofread it. Now in what spectacular way can I end it? Oh, I know! Vsignature which you are not required to read if you have read it beforeV

EDIT AGAIN: But first, I should say, my characters haven’t been around all day, and I don’t think that I could really post in the character chats without them, so uh, yeah.