Chronicling My Outreach to the Internet
I've joined a few internet bulletin boards and forums, and not found a lot of kindred spirits, but... some. Yet to date, this has not provided any additional readers or comments to the journal.

The experience I felt was the best was a conversation held on the forum for the International Association for the Study of Dreams:

http://dreamtalk.hypermart.net/bb2005/viewtopic.php?t=1975&highlight=&sid=5a99d7e9fcdc11de5ac389136eda6205

Thoughtful responses, though it kind of fell off. And there's no evidence that anyone actually clicked through to the journal entries I posted, as all the responses merely address the content of the forum message. I actually did click through to Al's dream blog, which is unique in that it is Illustrated...I've thought of doing this, where warranted. But on Al's blog it's not easy to see which dreams are lucid and which are not, and it generally seems to be missing the details I'm looking for. (Bravo however for remembering them and keeping so many notes.)

My luck with the Steve Pavlina forum wasn't particularly great in terms of the Pavlinites, who seem to be a bit doofy by and large. Though Steve himself is a well-spoken guy:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/search.php?searchid=361636

Tribe.Net was a wasteland, and I deleted my account:

http://footintwoworlds.tribe.net/thread/c6ff5de6-d27c-45ee-9bd1-85390bcbf639
http://lucid-dreamers.tribe.net/thread/c3ba367c-aa0f-4651-92c6-9388b709620c
http://footintwoworlds.tribe.net/thread/4236bf34-32db-4ad9-b8ff-ea9bf6274fda

Orkut was a lot of dead air and one-sentence posts, but my understanding is that the only people using it are in Brazil, so maybe English isn't their main language:

http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=12393&tid=5303800

I feel that the UseNet news hierarchy is, by and large, pretty pathetic... spammers and trolls, which is too bad, because it's based on a good distributed standard. I'd rather send someone an email than write their myspace account, and by the same token I'd rather post to a usenet group rather than someone's web forum.

As hopeless as UseNet is overall, the response to my initial post to alt.dreams.lucid was civil and friendly, but it didn't bring any readership or new insight:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.dreams.lucid/browse_thread/thread/9e9540eaf953f602/1e35ece5f6646f18?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=4#1e35ece5f6646f18

Also, once a chemist did a good identification of a crystallography spam, and seemed like a cool and open-minded dude...entertaining spam conspiracy theories even when we were on a mainstream science group:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.chem/browse_thread/thread/1f279b8639fad770/32aad920539ef93b?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=7#32aad920539ef93b

I was happy to get some zero pole magnet feedback, after the dream about those:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.electromag/browse_thread/thread/775043800f39f76/350f8963233e7a9f?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=6#350f8963233e7a9f

Other dialogue hasn't gotten results:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.movies.the-matrix/browse_thread/thread/cf25d7646096a2b8/635c5a7e50f80f39?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook+matrix&rnum=1#635c5a7e50f80f39

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.dreams.lucid/browse_thread/thread/3b7facc83fb16a7e/3dfaa710f71c03ad?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=1#3dfaa710f71c03ad

I haven't tried that hard to talk to dream bloggers, because many of them seem to get very little done in a lucid state...and when they do, they have only the most superficial of paraphrases to offer of what they did. But "Ben" at DreamingLife seems to be making his first steps into the kind of territory I study. So I made an introduction, with no response:

http://dreaminglife.org/2007/07/31/how-i-got-into-lucid-dreaming-back-in-1999/

I don't understand why someone like that wouldn't be interested in the findings of someone who is (frankly) a lot further along in the process, and willing to talk.

Update: recent outreach I'm going to put down so I can track them:

http://johncox88.com/?p=321
http://godchildren.livejournal.com/31975.html?thread=149479#t149479

I'm not sure what direction to take outreach at this point, how important it is to me, and how to improve if it is. I refined my profile info a bit so that at least people know what this journal is about. I've been mostly timid about contacting prominent people like Steven LaBerge or Richard Linklater (director of Waking Life) because of these lackluster experiences. But perhaps if I arranged my notes and concepts better, and just disregarded the internet response, I could start some conversations worth having.