I'm not sure the Star of Wonder does anything at all, although I must confess when I went through the course I did not own any mirrors, so I had to use the edge of a well-polished knife to see the star. Very difficult when you've only got one inch of visual space.
As far as the dictionary game goes, it's more or less an amplifier for how you're already feeling. I'm not trying to give you new-age guilt here. I'm sure that you can understand every word in this post, so you really don't need to have any comprehension of the dictionary. As far as knowing where a word is in the dictionary, if you understand alphabetical order you can find it consciously. All in all, it's a game. Games are fun when we win.
I've been on the posting boards for a while now, and one thing I remember is a poster had amazing success with the dictionary game the first time around, and then could not duplicate the results. Alex's advice (at least I think it was Alex, he's a font of useful advise on PhotoReading and other topics), was to do something more that play games with the dictionary. Really, did you plop down your hard-earned money to play around with a highly abridged dictionary, or is your purpose to quickly gain useful information from books?
I consider myself a fairly skilled PhotoReader, and I still use the index and table of contents to find information I desire conscious access to. Knowing where something is instinctively is useful, there is no question of that. Rabis, from what I've been told, spend much more time memorizing the layout of holy texts than memorizing the content. The reason is the importance of transmitting correct information unaltered by the genralization, delition and distortion that effects human memory. However, different people come into PhotoReading with different goals. If you're like most PhotoReaders, the bulk of your reading materials is going to come from libraries. If this is the case, as it is with me, then content is much more important than placement.
I hope this has given you some perspective.
