Did it work? OPEN BETA TWOTLD of cvdmehden

[StephL]

I am not sure, if your whole program has been presented, cvdmehden - I think not, were there not all in all 20 sessions planned? I would have left it be - but you seem to think, you were successful, and I'll try providing a little reality check. Since you still want to publish the book and even mention your testing on here, despite a total fail in my view (measured against your promises) - I thought lets wrap up the affair properly and in the scientific spirit you invoked with calling it all "BETA Testing". Here the initial poll, who would be willing to test the program: http://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-...ta-twotld.html This poll is supposed to be a critical analysis of results. All in all 25 people were planning to take part at the onset, including myself - I wonder, how the others evaluate the usefulness of your contribution to lucid dreaming. Personally I am very disappointed and what was promised just simply didn't happen. I would be so free to venture, that this goes for everybody else besides me as well. Because what was promised was a revolution in lucid dreaming - a secret key, no less, which would enable all of us to be extraordinarily successful lucid dreamers, who are able to LD at will and reach the level of the outliers on a bell-curve. This would be easy and not take a lot of time on top of it all. Most people with a positive mindset after the testing are only and exclusively reporting, that they would like the exercises and would feel they are more aware of real life now. But that was hardly the point of it! That's not to say, that your exercises weren't nice or probably useful - just that they are in no way superior to anything else. I did some of them - but neither was there anything new - I have seen it all before, ideas and exercises in their basics - nor was there a secret revealed. I'll cite you a bit, to put this poll into perspective: Yet that road has been well trodden, and we know where it leads… to weeks of frustration with perhaps a moment of success or two, followed by an inevitable loss of interest as our minds find something else upon which to focus that gives more immediate rewards. I don't want to write another book on lucid dreaming. Those shores are well explored. For myself, having been chasing this lucid dreaming mirage for now over 15 years, I have come to one certain conclusion regarding the instructional materials currently available: they don't work. Now, it's not that they don't work at all. In fact, many of the texts and techniques have withstood the test of time precisely because they do work. More specifically, they sort of work. Occasionally. Sporadically. For some people. And almost by accident. Many of the most accomplished lucid dreamers report success rates of about 5-10%. Soo - all the available material - like ETWOLD and this forum and it's contents - only sort of work and are vastly inferior to your methods??! And your methods are something revolutionary, secret and new?? Why have we come to believe that this is simply the way of things? If we applied those success rates to just about anything else (airplanes, medications, electronics, educational programs, etc), we'd quickly have a problem involving angry customers, lawsuits, and a search for a better product. Yupp - you are bound to get it with selling the book: angry customers. Since you gave us your text for free - there seems to be no relevant anger - but if I would have paid - I would be seriously pissed. Where is the evidence, that your approach does work? How was your success rate over this testing? I have looked through the threads, and I was actually surprised to only find one report of an LD, which is possibly being attributed to your method: I've just felt like doing this second part of the exercise, so I performed it spontaneously a few times lately and I've had this lucid where I just knew I was dreaming and felt more "present" than usually. I think it might be related to the exercises for two reasons: I was having one lucid every two weeks but I've had two lucids this week while doing the exercises a little bit, and that feeling of "present" I didn't have for a while. Correct me please, if I missed something - but for sure it can't be much. I suspected, it would go that way - it's hardly ever sensible to start out with as much hyperbole: Yet for some reason, 5-10% is acceptable in lucid dreaming. It's what's expected. Years of hard work for little to no pay off. So to me, rather than compiling yet another collection of random dream tricks and philosophy, it seems expedient that we first question the most basic premises of our lucid dreaming practices and procedures. In our current view of reality, lucid dreaming is a difficult task. Except for a lucky few, it is a skill that requires extraordinary amounts of practice and dedication in order to begin to reap its rewards. If there were a way to somehow discover the rug upon which our ideas of lucid dreaming are built, and then to subsequently grab ahold of that rug and pull with all our might, we might just reveal something: a secret door, a simple thing, an elegant thing through which we may step from being accidental lucid dreamers with minimal success to intentional lucid dreamers who confidently step from one realm to the next, at will. Did somebody in the testing change her respective view of reality? Are you among the lucky few now, with his help? It did not work - nobody reported something remotely similar to what you promised - can't see anybody reaching a different conclusion. Now secrets are tricky things. If they were easy to discover, they would have been found out long ago and we'd already hold the keys to the dreaming realms. But, as their name implies, they are secret. They're hidden, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes in forgotten places, under seas, or lost in time. To find a secret is no small feat. It requires cunning, and sometimes courage. Well, well, well - bit more cunning wouldn't have hurt.