Today I am reviewing a semi-famous DVD in the dreaming community. You may have seen links for it on LD4all, or in other places as well. I am not doing this as a paid review, or anything like that. This is simply my opinion on the information contained in SaltCube’s DVD I hope that this review might help you make a decision if you were considering buying the DVD.

Information
The information on the DVD is very good, as well as very poignant. He has both basic information and definitions for the beginning dreamer as well as more advanced how to types of information. He also includes a few types of exercises to help you WILD. There’s a lot of great and varied information. I thought he really covered the basics and a little more above them. Most of it was stuff I’d heard before, but I read a great number of books as well as online information. Even I picked up some new stuff though, and the small tips have been very helpful. I’m not sure if I agree with his explanations for why everything happens like it does, but whatever the mechanism, the techniques are effective.

Presentation
The presentation in this DVD is good, if somewhat standard. While he is explaining an idea, he typically highlights the main ideas by putting them in text for you to read. Other times he’ll use images to help get the idea across, which was helpful in a few instances. The only really nonstandard way conveying information he used was when he was explaining how to observe things in dreams. He gives you a first person perspective of walking around and getting sensory information, directly showing how you might do it in a dream. This is about as direct as you can get as far as relaying information, being shown.

Organization.
The DVD is organized in a very general sense. It starts with basic knowledge and definitions and progresses into more advanced concepts later. Outside of that though, I didn’t really see a pattern in the information presented. Because he chose an organizational structure based more on difficulty than type of information, it makes it harder to go back and look something up. This isn’t a huge deal, because he tells you what is in part I and part II, but it’s just general locations. This does make it more beginner friendly though, as you are eased into the more difficult techniques as well as learning the basics and terminology first.

Overall
I would recommend this DVD to anybody who hasn’t been reading a lot of literature about dreaming. (If you only visit one site or forum, this DVD will probably have a lot of new things for you) If however, you’re more like me and tend to hoard dreaming information, there’s less of a benefit to buying this DVD. It still will probably fill some gaps in your knowledge, but it won’t put you leaps and bounds ahead of where you were. For anybody though, it is a well put together source of information.

-Hatter

Popularity: 19% [?]

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This is rather off the beaten path for this blog, but I’m going to write for the contest that Problogger is holding. At the same time, I really want to make it valuable to the other bloggers who read this, so I’m going to write some things I think help the everyday dreamer in blogging. If you think I’m selling out somehow by doing this, I don’t plan on doing this often or even anytime in the near future, because I value my readership (whatever size it is), but at the same time, I do have some thoughts on this subject. (In no particular order)

Tips for Keeping A Dreaming Blog On Topic, Relevant, and Interesting:

1. Keeping an online dream journal may attract some attention from people who have similar experiences, but by and large it doesn’t help anybody outside of entertainment value. Unless you somehow extract valuable lessons from your dreams or something similar, most people will lost interest quickly.

2. Use your experience to help others overcome obstacles you’ve already surpassed. This way, as you progress farther in your dream work, others can benefit from it and will continue reading.

3. Use dreams as an inspiration for your writing. Dreams are an amazing resource for innovation, and have been for many, many, years, so utilize them.

4. You can bend/break the first rule when you have a really important and insightful experience. If you just had your first lucid dream, and you really felt a great feeling of introspective power over yourself, others would probably be interested in reading about the experience. (especially if they’re still trying to get a lucid dream, it’s great inspiration)

5. Don’t lose sight of your goal, whatever it may be.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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My “Dreaming Slump” as I deemed it several weeks ago continues. I still remember my dreams, despite getting little sleep lately, as well as not practicing many things I should be, due to lack of energy. I’ve hit that fateful problem of just being too tired to do anything when you finally are done with tasks and are ready for bed. I’m going to make more of an effort to plan in dreaming exercises, so this should change.

Then again… It seems to me like this is just a bad time for the dreaming community. I haven’t really seen a lot of progress on many sites, most of them seem to be in some form of hibernation. There’s activity to be sure, but nothing new is being done, no new innovations or exciting projects, with one exception:

A new blog and its sister site: Bliss Of Being and Healing Beats.While technically not directly dreaming related, they are both indirectly related. Bliss of Being is a broad reaching personal development site, and Healing Beats is a site dedicated to building a community around binaural beats. Healing beats looks to offer a lot once it gets some momentum, as it offers free binaural beats as well as a place to learn how to create beats as well as share them. The creator of these two sites is Wayne, who is an experienced mediator and binaural beats user. We should be seeing some guests posts from him soon, so keep an eye out for that.

I hope that I can make some progress soon, otherwise things might continue to hibernate. I hope the community as a whole wakes up a little more too.

-Hatter

Popularity: 17% [?]

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