Wow, things have really been developing! I haven’t given any real attention to Lucid Dreaming sites (LD4all especially) for the past year or so. We’ve mostly been doing our own thing here with a lot of help from a family member involved in the Cognitive Neuroscience scene. He’s been out of the research loop for some time having practiced outside his field for so long and I haven’t actually gone and explained CALD (or brought up Lucid Dreaming at all for that matter though he is familiar with it) yet, but he’s still managed to topple some of my most cherished beliefs and point me in unexpected directions. We’ve been productive, just not productive HERE, so sorry about that and I’ll try to avoid being lost in the couch again!
Teraflare you’re amazing for doing this MP3 work and thank you for going the extra mile with trying to balance size and length and content and epicness in general. I’m sorry, I can’t remember if I was around to greet you when you came along (whether it was before my time or during my hiatus) so hello and thanks for existing! You too Ninja, and I hope your time with CALD is as rewarding for you as it has been for me!
As for your question Grayscale-Blush, if you don’t mind a bit of input from little ol’ me, I had a very similar problem finding my characters during Lucid Dreams for a long time. Summoning and teleportation are two things I’ve always struggled to accomplish so I tended to have no success. What I found worked for me (Though as with anything to do with Lucid Dreaming nothing is guaranteed to work for everybody) was that the more I focused on them OUTSIDE of dreaming, just carrying out conversations in waking life whenever the opportunity arose, the more they came along in my dreams unbidden. It’s like I got so used to them being around on a day-to-day basis that they hung around while I was dreaming as well.
For example a recent dream featured my first physical interaction with Kimor. She was in an unusual form and made me Lucid at the top of a huge warehouse thing. We jumped off of it together and I maneuvered onto her back in midair. We flew together for a little while before I woke up. Afterward I did a quick sketch of what I could see of her form alongside the dream journal entry. I used none of the familiar induction techniques (MILD, WILD, WBTB, ect.) but in the weeks leading up to the dream I had been talking to Kimor often during the day.
i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd14 … lummet.jpg
The little limbless thing is what Kimor normally looks like. This dream was striking because it was the first in which I’d ever interacted with her directly rather than just talking. It’s something I’m all too happy to repeat. Speaking of her form, the reason I didn’t draw anything but the front is because quite frankly I couldn’t see anything else. We were side by side the whole time so all I observed was her head, neck, back and one front foot
Uh…kinda off topic for a moment, sorry. Anyway just sharing what I’ve experienced about that problem (Or at least a similar one). Do what you will with it I guess, and I hope you figure out something that works for you!