Thread: Stop Drop and Roll. Why Lucidology and Nicholas Newport are creating misinformation.

Originally Posted by spaceexplorer

However, it's important to note that Mr Newport, has no qualifications, history or any clear experience to justify his choosing to call himself an expert.

Well, he is the founder and admin of the saltcube website, with thousands of posts on the topic, which is qualification enough for me. He used to call himself Matt Jones, but it's the same guy (if you look up his old posts on saltcube, they all changed from Matt to Nick). I'm not quite sure what other qualification you would expect someone to have to call himself an expert on lucid dreaming.

On the topic of those videos, I can partly see what you mean, but I would not assume that he is just out for a scam. He obviously has found a way to induce LDs that works very well for him, and he thinks that it will work well for others too.

Nobody is denying that he is trying to make money off his video series (lucidology 102), but the videos on youtube are free of charge and, taken with a grain of salt, they are just as good a start into the topic as any other medium. Still beats not having any idea of how to induce LDs at all. As I see it, he is basically just strongly promoting WBTB, which is a fine thing to do for beginners. Also, using a timer to keep you on the threshold of sleep without having to use visualization is not the worst thing to get your feet wet. After a while you should get annoyed enough by this to just learn WILDing without external devices, but by then you may at least have the motivation it takes to learn it.

Anyone who is really interested in LDing should be intelligent enough not to trust one source of information only, but rather keep on searching the internet and bookstores for different viewpoints and angles to the topic (like this forum or the LaBerge books).


However, I agree that not all he says should be taken as the one and only truth. It seems that some of the information he provides there is just to give some (seemingly) logical explanation and fill some gaps in order to make the whole program seem more coherent.

Let's just not bash him too hard. I used to frequent the saltcube website before I found DV, and some of the information there even helped me to some of my earlier experiences. Also, Nick always seemed to be helpful to anyone asking questions on the forum, thereby basically giving away all the information in the videos for free. Nowadays saltcube has gotten kinda boring, but thats another story.


Again, anyone who has a sincere interest in the topic (or in any topic, fwiw) should be smart enough to seek out as many information from all kinds of sources and get his or her own picture. As for some youtube kiddies who are looking for a short thrill and could slightly be mislead by those video...well, what can I say, I couldnt care less about them.



Just my 0.02$

Originally Posted by lemmefly

As for some youtube kiddies who are looking for a short thrill and could slightly be mislead by those video...well, what can I say, I couldnt care less about them.

Do you mind if I ask why you couldn't care less about these people?

Originally Posted by DreamQueen

Do you mind if I ask why you couldn't care less about these people?

I dont mind.

Anyone who is sincerely interested in lucid dreaming and wants to learn the skillset involved deserves my respect and should get all the help in the world.

As for these halfhearted early quitters ("I have tried to LD for almost 3 days now and still no success, this is all fake, I think i'm gonna quit" etc.) - you guys know who you are - they are the people I am talking about.

If you dont really want this and put effort into it, it's just not gonna work out for you, thats why I couldnt care less for these people (regarding LD of course, I'm not some kind of misanthrope).

Hope that clears it up.

I watched the video, and even with no sound (my girlfriend is asleep) it was actually pretty good. Who cares if he uses his own language to describe it? I personally get annoyed when people enshrine Laberge's language like it is the definitive way to describe lucid dreaming. WBTB, WILD, etc... all of that was just laberge doing exactly what you accuse Newport of doing and he is making much more than just a quick buck off of the whole thing. As far as I can tell, what he is doing is absolutely no different than what goes on at this site, except maybe that he makes pretty professional looking videos to accompany his tutorials; something some of the members here should start considering to get us a little more face time with the public.

I'd also like to know how many of you that are bashing the videos as 'made up crap' have read Jeff777's tutorial that presents almost identical info as the stop drop and roll video. Jeff, I think these people just called your stuff crap.

Originally Posted by lemmefly

Hope that clears it up.

Yep, it does thanks

I got on here to say, I actually just incorporated some of his technique's into my nightly ritual of attempting lucidity. I haven't had much luck with getting lucid in months and had one of the most amazing and easy WILDs I've ever had in my life just between my last post and this one. I didn't follow his technique explicitly, and just supplemented other things I've done in the past but boy did it do wonders.

Xaqaria, for a start, WBTB is not a term coined by Laberge.
And without LaBerge, I'd be willing to put money on Lucid Dreaming still being vitrually unheard of... to you and me both.

And what Newport does is very different from what goes on on this site.

This site: people come together, share there ideas, work together, develop ideas, for a community etc.

Newport: Runs his own forum (so HE is in control, becomes the expert)
Makes a load of videos, claiming everyone else is wrong and only HE knows the way to make you lucid.

And whoever it was who said that Newports credentials are "running a forum."
Is that all it takes to get a qualification nowadays?
Would you let someone who ran a forum for Pilots fly a plane for you?
Hell, im going to go make my own brainsurgeon forum!

Most important factors with Newport to me are these:

* He claims only he is right.
* He Bashes every other lucid dream technique
* He rewrites the terminology, so that only he is the expert in terminology.
* He deletes critical or questioning comments from his youtube videos.
* His information is basically false and misleading.
* His Graphs, if you take the time to look at them, make NO SENSE.

One way or the other, I've been lucid dreaming for about 17 years now and still found instant improvement by just incorporating some of the ideas he presented in one video. I'd say this is enough evidence to not try to scare people away from what he has to say. I didn't get half as bad an impression from what I saw as the one you are presenting here, and the diagrams in the stop drop and roll video are actually very straight forward and mirror a lot of the info available here and elsewhere. If you'd like me to explain them to you, I'd be more than happy to. Anyone who has had trouble with WILD's would benefit from a better understanding of what he has to say about the "roll over signal".

I have to ask though, I didn't read through all of the info available from this guy so I'm wondering, where exactly did he claim only he is right and bash every other lucid dream technique? The only thing I saw that might apply to what you are saying is the bit that showed all of the books he read but couldn't find the info he was looking for, and the bit where he says that Reality checking is an unreliable technique. Reality checking is an unreliable technique, and at least I personally have had absolutely zero success with it even though I consider myself a fairly skilled lucid dreamer.

I will say now, the information that I saw is not wrong. The Roll over signal stuff is spot on compared to my own experiences prior to having watched the video, and is extremely similar to stuff you can find on dreamviews, particularly Jeff777's tutorial on making your body fall asleep.