Novice Dreamers need LD mentors!

Quest for Lucidity
36

wow basilus what an exellent reply there.

i have been following this discussion and i’m open for a ‘teacher’ tutor, ‘buddy’ kind of system, but we need to introduce something that will work. What basilus now says are mainly my own thoughts too (private is not viewable for others - also it will get a strain on the tutor if too many ppl PM him/her)

how do you see the group thing? Another forum not hidden, where members (‘students’) join for a project? Like the lab you have to be member of a specific group to post? and all members can read?

The chatroom, well #ld4all can get way off topic, that’s why we have created #dreamtime - that is the LD4all chatroom for only LD related topics.

(we tried to do it the other way around by making #LD4all the LD only room and making the #lucid_lounge room for off topic conversation but that didn’t work)

37

Nice reply, basilus :smile:

pasQuale, isn’t there already a “lab” for that sort of thing? The Lucid Laboratory?

But I agree with r3mot: New LDers just post their question without seeing if something similar is already posted, and if the answer is what they’re looking for.

I think there should be a FAQ for this sort of thing. Like:

Get my point?

EDIT: Nevermind, we alreayd have an FAQ :smile:

38

OK, I hope I don’t offend anyone but the Point of the Tutor is lost. This forum is a great forum there is nothing wrong with it. IT IS NOT CONFUSING. The idea of a tutor is to have a personal 1 on 1 with an experienced LDer.

Holy crap, how did we get from asking for a tutor to beating up on the site? :eh:

39

El Gordo

I agree with you it is a great site. I don’t think it was anyone intention to “beat up on the site”. I think you may have read more into some of the posts or some posts may have used some confusing wording.

I agree that a mentor program is not “needed” for the reasons I already stated. It does seem that some people would like to have a one to one connection with someone so it might be a good “option” to have. I just don’t know how the “mechanics” of it would work.

I do have to disagree with one of the comments listed above. While I agree there may not be a lot of LD masters on ld4all. There are certainly a lot of good competent lucid dreamers here from ( for lack of better terms) mid level to advanced. Yes, there are more than you can count on one hand.

40

Okay i think i have come up with an idea to solve all the problems, i think somebody should create a program. Now Jeff came into my mind, he is the guy who made the OBE and dream journal software which he sells, i think if he was to make a piece of software which basically runs in the computer background and tells you at certain times of the day to do a reality check also if it was to try to relax you using a sort of relaxation mp3, and a hypnotize file, and if it could use a subliminal flasher where youselect the sentence or word for it to flash at you, that would be really good. Also it would come on at certain times of the day and tell you if you have written your dreams in your journal and it could also tell you how was your day and you basically say yes or no and it could understand your words as it would use like a kind of fake pre determined artificial intellegience, but what makes it really shine is that jeff could put every word ever discused in this forum and scan it into the software, then there would be sections in the program for novice dreamer to internediate to advanced, where you would select a tab, then there would be a huge list of words and sentences from this site and all you have to do is search within the program and you can find key words and then you can read from there and also you can ask your question in the program and the software will find anything matching your words and try to bring back a topic to do with your question, so in a way the software has to be written in a language similar to ask jeeves.com so it can bring back a topic matching to your words, just like how ask jeeves finds a website matching closely to your question. I can see this as really working and i belive we would benefit from this sort of thing, Jeff could give a 30 day trial and then you could purchase this for 10 dollars, so i think this would work, please tell me guys what you think.

41

wow i dont look here for a bit and there are a million more posts :wink:

well what has been said has been and i have no intention of repeating it bar thanx to basilus that was a great sum up. and you made a lot of good points there. Personal opion is a strong thing.

i will just mainly focus my coments on the last post. I tryed to make a program like that using VB, i am ok at it but i lost the passion when i found out how huge the project was and how little time i had to actually do it. Agreed that it would be a fantastic program but it would be huge, spec if the entireity of LD4all was listed in it. although in the future that would be a excellent reference.

If anyone has the time to make it go right ahead lol.

As for the mentor system, well i have been talking away in the chat room about this and Moogle gave me quite a few good points. Mixed with that advice and my own ideas, i am starting to think that the tut system isnt a great idea By pms already stated in posts before, but i dont think that a extra forum will make it any eaiser, not if it was for only the mebers of that section.

ok i aint making much sence let me try again. If we were to have a forum section with lets say 10 mentors in it and under each mentor there was about what 10 students or something and they all asked question to that mentor through that forum it would become very messy very quickly with a lot of questions asked over and over, and although this is a good thing for someone to respond to the same question over and over gets annoying. Hence the creation of the FAQ.

I think that a certain chat time might be the answer. I have noticed that a lot of web sites no matter what they are have chat rooms. yer well. anywayz in these chat rooms they have certian topics at certian times, what do they call them…events or somthing.

What if we were to do that here at LD4all. for example say saturday at 4pm GMT time about 20 lders who wish to partake and answer questions go to a chat room and then the rest is a bunch of newbies or anyone else that wishs to ask questions and get them answered. A Place to share experinces on both sides etc. and then afterwards it can be posted somewhere on Ld4all.

that would be like a mentor system but in realtime, and there would be a wide range of advice from a lot of diffrent people and therefor not one side to the story or a modeling of students…

oh wow i hope that made sence i am so much better at talking then writing lol

42

honeyjigga

That is interesting idea but, it is not really the issue. The point of the mentor program is so that a forum member would have a specific person that they could develop a one to one relationship with and learn lucid dreaming from. The issue is not with the site. The site it’s self is great.

I personally have been on both sides of this issue. On one hand it could be a cool option to have. I can see how offering one to one help may entice more people into ld4all. However, I can also see how that could get draining on the would be mentors. Besides, I think there are already many mentors on this site weather they know it or not.

Ld4all has helped many people learn to lucid dream as is. So, I sometimes think if “it’s not broke don’t fix it”. Other times I think if people want it and it draws more people into ld4all than so much the better.

The bottom line is no mater what decision is made it’s a “win win” situation. Leave things as is and people will continue to learn lucid dreaming on ld4all. Add the mentor program and it will only enhance an otherwise great site. Either way ld4all does not loose. :grin:

43

ROFL honeyjigga !!! :happy:
This program could be hard-coded in the brain of a wonderful female cyborg, so we could also… hmmm… perform some reality checks with her. A male version could also be produced, but later, cause there are not so much girls on the forum. Of course, the cyborg version will be not so cheap than the software… :sad: but Jeff could give a 30 days trial too, :smile: and during this time we could try to find the crack ! :tongue:

Milod, I agree with you. I just said that LD4all count perhaps 5 or less master dreamers and about 40 advanced dreamers, so a 1 by 1 tutor project is not realist.

El Gordo, my english is not so good, and I’m not sure I understand very well what you said :shy: , but I presume you are not very happy cause you really wanted a tutor.
Why not to post a topic somewhere, saying : I’m using such a technique, I’m want to improve in such things, my interest in LDing are this and this, I’m experiencing these problems now and I would like to meet a tutor or at least another LDer interested in the same things for such and such reasons.

If it works, it could be the beginning of a BIG “Searching a tutor” topic. ( …something like the Yahoo!Personals, for instance… :love: :clown: ) :grin:

But, as someone said, this could be deceipting for a lot of people, cause there are less master dreamers than advanced dreamers, and less advanced dreamers than beginners.
And if, like me, you hardly find relevant information about a topic, why not to post : Did you see this topic somewhere ? or just asking for information, and if the topic exists, you’ll probably find someone who will give you the link, as it has be done many times.

Q, DreamerKrystal, thanks a lot for your kind reply. It really touch me. :clown:
I’ll think about the way in which people can meet personnaly on LD4all, without losing information for others, cause I agree in the fact it could be more motivating.

PS : while I was writing this post, 2 answers were posted. I will read them.

44

milod789

I actually thought, what if this forum could combine my idea of a mentoring program into the forum, so what i mean by this is that you basically install the program first, but then the only way you can use it is that you have to come onto this website and then into the forum. This way i believe that people won’t suddenly go off and only use the program, instead they will always be coming to this great forum, and even with the program they can only write posts in this forum except in the chatroom well more on that later. Anyway back to the last bit, so they get onto this forum from within the program thats running in the background and instead of the program having a scan of everything on this forum, instead when you search in the program it will basically do a much more refined search from within this forum, and you know when we write LD or OBE you know as you read this you get the letters underlined and then when you move your mouse cursor over it, it explanins what the acronyms mean, well i do not know what you call this, so i had this idea that you use a similar idea where people could click on some kind of letters and then it brings up something to do with that thing within the program. So in a way i thought if the program could run in the background it could be programmed to come up when you click on things in the forum and could only come up from within the forum and it could sit onscreen either side by side to the text on the forum or up and above, and within this program we could run a chat room, now you will need probably a lot of server space so i think if Jeff could do that and charge for this kind of service and it would be combined with this forums server, then we could do something really great i imagin. Well these are just my thoughts, please lets get everyones ideas together, because i like the sound of a mentor and if it can be done within a program aswell, then i believe that this forum which is the best on the internet for LD and OBE will expand and bring the future here for today.

45

OK, to sum up:

  • A program.
  • It could be done by Jeff.
  • It could do stuff like reality check reminders and subliminal messages and it can play mp3s too!
  • It could tell you whether you had entered stuff in your journal today.
  • It could ask you how your day was, and you could reply yes or no.
  • It could have every single word and sentence in the forum and it could automagically jumble them up to create coherent articles about LD related topics. This would also provide links back to threads in the forum.
  • Like Ask Jeeves, it could find a thread which will answer your question.
  • It could be commercial.
  • (next post now)
  • The program would only be useful with the forum because it is connected.
  • People can click on some letters and then the program brings up something to do with it.
  • It could come up next to or above the forum while you are browsing it.

OK, um, where to start with my refutation? I’ll make my bullet points align with those above.

  • No problem.
  • Also no problem, if he really wants to.
  • This is what tends to be called ‘bloat’. It is too much for one program. Why create your own mp3 player with play, pause, and stop at least? People can just open winamp or windows media player and open the mp3 files that came with the program.
    If I wanted to use my computer to aid my lucidity (which I would not do because I can only use it one day in two) then I would run seperate programs for reality checks, a dream journal, and an “information resource” (like the forums, or this program…)
  • Why would I want to know whether I had entered in my dream journal?
  • Again, why would I want that? I want a tool for lucidity, not a timewaster. There’s no point and it’s far too hard to program: extremely hard, requiring knowledge of linguistics as well as programming skills. Again, bloat. Consider your Windows computer. You have a spellchecker in Microsoft Office (or similar program). If you want your browser (Firefox or similar) to spellcheck, the people working at the browser have to do it themselves; they aren’t able to use Microsoft Office spellchecker, even if you already have it! Similarly, many (bad) programs (perhaps a DVD player or CD burner) will re-create their own style of buttons, etc. Why bother? It’s duplication of work. (I was going to start about how the UNIX/Linux way is different but this point is getting too long anyway and I’m beginning to veer off-course.)
  • Firstly, much of the forum, even the parts officially for lucid dreaming discussion, is irrelevant, off-topic, and most importantly, redundant. Answers (and questions too) are repeated tens of times over. Here’s a tip: Skip to page 10 (I picked this at random) of Intro or Quest, and read every post in every thread. Rather a lot, isn’t it? u need to b able 2 handle this – style of comment occassionally!!!11 – and indeed this style too, whereas – some, people misplace their commas – and end sentences often like this… – providing paragraph breaks every line – or indeed not at all (look back at your own posts). It is not feasible for a computer, or even a group of humans, to attempt to in any way completely summarise all ~~~60,000 posts in the LD sections.
  • I don’t think you quite understand how Ask Jeeves works or worked. First (my father tells me), they tried artificial intelligence. Obviously a computer cannot understand that this page answers the question “How can I speed up my minimax without sacrificing accuracy?” or even that this answers the question “When was ‘The Incredible Machine 2’ released?” and they could never manage to provide this as an understood answer for the hard style of question, “What is a good site for information on {lucid dreaming}?”.
    What they therefore used was a keywords-based “understanding” of pages. This still worked badly and must have been a pain to “tune” too.
    What they then used was a database of questions compiled by humans. Searching for “What cheats are there for The Sims?”, it would probably notice ‘cheats’, ‘What’ (suggesting a multiple-choice answer), and ‘The Sims’, a name. It might then present the question, with “The Sims” replaced with a dropdown of many, many, many games. Clicking on the “Ask!” button to the left would then send you directly to the correct page at some massive cheats site which probably payed Ask Jeeves!.
    This was most certainly an ass to maintain. They would have to keep up not only with the common questions, but with reasonable coverage of “rare” fields. They failed.
    Ask Jeeves turned from a new attempt for artifical intelligence to what it is now, a pathetic search engine which works pretty much like any other.
  • Commercial? Well, there’s a limited market of users, and all its information would be freely available here (learn to use the “Search” link everybody!), and that wish to collaborate for a hypnosis audio file still hasn’t produced anything (I think), and it might end up having loads of extra crap like a damned computer asking me how my day was.
  • next post, and sorry I got a bit carried away just now.
  • Again, not good if you want it to sell. By the way, are you even sure that we are allowed to just package in everybody’s comments and sell it? There is some sort of license I’m writing this under, whether my text is being owned by pasQuale or me.
  • Eh? Um, like a glossary?
  • That would be nice, I suppose, but I really don’t need that. Honestly. I just don’t. It probably wouldn’t work in Firefox. Or IE. Or both. Personally, the thread I’m reading is what I want to read.

Additionally, I’ll try to be a bit polite about this: consider adding line breaks (I prefer double, to make them paragraph breaks, but it’s your choice), consider capitalising your “I”-s, consider previewing your post instead of always using Quick Reply like I did before I realised it was inadequate, and consider not drafting Jeff into this automatically, and consider splitting up long sentences. This would improve your posts’ readability and increase your audience and improve your… um… good word… credibility. :content:

46

Anyway, back to the main topic (by the way, splitting the “ld4all program” posts off might be a good idea).

Oh yes, honeyjigga: El Gordo carefully said: The forum is not inadequate, but perhaps some people would appreciate one-to-one tutoring. A program does not count. :razz:

TimeLess_Soul: 10 pupils to a tutor is not “one to one” tutoring :wink:.

We do not necessarily need people who are actually good at lucid dreaming. I am not very good at it but I can answer most ‘stock’ questions fairly well. Most people (I’m guessing) think that their question is original, but it rarely is. (Except when they’re asking about their own dream, in which case it rarely isn’t :wink:).

47

Oops ! :shy: Honeyjigga, I thought you were kidding with your program cause it would be so difficult to realize !
I don’t think that someone who already works can do this in less than one year ! Am I wrong ?

48

i think we need to rename this topic to longest posts this is taking ages to sift through lol.

one to one tuts will be extremly hard, but hey who am i to say just imho

r3mot you know that experince is the best way to learn anyone can read a text book and learn from it but it is when you get out there and try it for your self that you can give the best help to others. in no way am i saying that what you would say wouldnt be helpful just experince is the best talker if you follow

49

I agree with you Timeless_Soul. And it will be messy too if there was a threat “Teacher X and Student Y”, cause a lot of different questions and topics would be posted in the same threat. Other people could never find relevant information in it.

I think that events could be a good idea.

Concerning the main topic, I haven’t the faintest idea about making LDers meet together in a more personnal way. I’m not such good in human organization, indeed. :sad:

50

Well, what am I to do? Squeeze an orange in their sleep? (check the “rare techniques” thread to get this joke :wink:) :smile:

If I ask whether I could practice chess in my lucid dream, I might not want to pursue lucid dreaming if I couldn’t. Therefore, I need the question answered “textbook style”. Plus, questions like these will arouse my interest in lucid dreaming, which is always good when wanting lucid dreams. :smile:

51

Beep beep topic dead topic dead. I want bump, but is no good for rules.

Have we agreed some questions are better answered personally and others impersonally? (“Wikibook style” in fact? :wink:)

52

I don’t know. I don’t think we agreed to anything as of yet.

Though it does appear that people have lost interest in this topic. Perhaps the mentor idea was not as popular as I thought?

53

I think this is a good idea. We should have a class.collage system, where people learn to LD.

I would be happy to be a montor. I don’t think we should have degrees, as it leeds to people feeling they have failed if they get a low degree.

Prehaps a first LD award etc!

54

Technodreamer: Perhaps you could detail your idea?

Major problems, though:

  • Time zone differences (not so bad, just slow everything down)
  • Not many new people = everybody at different stages
55

I don’t have any objection to having a mentoring program so long as the atmosphere at ld4all does not change. At all costs we want to avoid creating elite an class of members as I think that would ruin the open atmosphere here at ld4all.

However, I have no idea how the classroom thing would work. It’ a good idea. I just don’t know how you would put that into practice.