How to Effectively Visualize: Part 1 - Incubation

**Sensei** · 05-09-2017 04:50 AM

INTRO
This is part 1 of the guide, but all things visualization and on how to increase visualization will all be discussed in this thread. So, a little bit of a rambling, defining, and tutorial on how to visualize. In all honesty, it reminds me of the thread: http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-sign...ompendium.html By StaySharp, except this is about visualization. I will have a TL;DR at the end for those that don't feel like reading a lot of info, but you won't get the full effect of the thread that way.

Visualization is:
The representation of an object, situation, or set of information as a chart or other image.
And
The formation of a mental image of something.
Dream is:
a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.
Sleep is:
a condition of body and mind which typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended.

So, for me, looking at this, dreaming and lucid dreaming are a form of visualization, the big difference is the nervous system being shut off. Even though the two are incredibly similar and I think can really benefit the other, there are very few hardcore visualization experts here, but no visualization guides (Nothing as comprehensive or helpful as I am wanting!). I will be quoting a few things from people around the forums and different ideas as to why I think that visualization is helpful to Lucid Dreaming and just dreaming in general.

Anyone that WILDs a lot can tell you that dreams are not cut and dry like you think, there isn’t a magical barrier that separates dreams and waking. Most people that DILD a lot can even tell you that they have heard/seen things after a dream that were in waking. So the dream and waking are separated by a spectrum that can only be defined by the amount of “visualization” you have, I believe. This is often seen by visualization abilities increasing closer to sleep (on WBTBs for instance, will go into this more later, so hold your freaking horses), Hypnagogic Hallucinations, NREM dreams, as well as the max form of visualization being dreams.

Visualization
This is a spectrum as well, because there are 5 traditional forms of it: Sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatosensation, but I will be using the word “tactile”, technically somatosensation is closer to the idea we are working for here, but tactile is easier to write and close enough!) I personally recommend not putting a number on how well you can visualize certain things too often, since you might place something at an 8/10 and the next month put something as 6/10 that felt the exact same due to your experience being better. I still recommend you putting these periodically, but write a sentence (or say a phrase) about how it is, instead of putting a vague number on it. Compare it to previous times, waking time, and dream time. On all 5 senses.

My “fake” body
There are a lot of things that can increase your visualization senses. Things like music, daydreaming, cooking, or sports can increase your ability to do one or more of these, since you are often thinking about them. Most people that spend time on one sense more than another often have this as the first sense that comes up when trying to sleep. Hearing music while trying to fall asleep is common among musicians or people that like to listen to music a lot. This being said, I think that we have two bodies, our physical body and our mind body.
Visual/tactile
Our physical body doesn’t need explaining. I am not trying to get metaphysical here and say that “both bodies are the same” or anything like that. I am saying that the physical body is just going to be the most basic idea of the physical body for this.
The mind body is not just the body we have in dreams! It is also what our body is like in our mind aside from our physical sensations that are sent to our mind. For instance:
I want you to toss a coin in the air and then catch it. Did you imagine catching it? If you caught it, then you actually put a mental representation of the coin and your hand (usually when catching I am only thinking about where my hand is, not the rest of my body, that moves on its own) and then you fast forwarded using the physical things you know to figure out where the ball would be. Your “mind body” caught it first. So right now, I assume that this is the same “mind body” that we have in dreams.

Muscle memory (no mind body)
This is different than muscle memory, because muscle memory is when you have used your actual body and(or) mind body enough times with a single thing that it actually doesn’t need to have the mind body do it anymore, the physical does it without thinking.
An example of muscle memory:
Stand up, walk around like normal. Did you think about how your body was moving? Probably not much unless you did something “new” or something that you haven’t done a million times. If you kipped up instead of standing normally, you probably had to think about some parts of your body, if you stumbled on anything, your body creates a quick mental map of the area around you and you usually catch yourself.

There are many things that your mind leaves to muscle memory and to visualization. When driving for instance, all of your movements have become automated if you have been driving for a while, and you usually have a 3D idea in your mind of where your car is in relation to the other cars. You will see a car in your rear view coming quickly and then stop looking at it, knowing approximately when it is going to pass you, or sometimes, if a car was behind you or in your blind spot and you know it would be there and it turns without you looking at it, it can actually be confusing because you think “where did that car go?” and feel like it just disappeared off the face of the earth, even though it could have turned ages ago, in your 3D model of the world around you, it was still there and that was broken.
Visual and tactile would be like when you hurt yourself, but don’t notice the pain until you see the injury. As well as our ability to feel others pain, like when you watch a crotch shot video and wince in pain with every slam.

This is your visual and tactile, that often slides into each other, but some that are 100% tactile are like thinking of the feel of a worm in your hands, or the sun on your skin, or someone biting you. You can usually easily pull these up, but only for a second, it isn’t like it hurts as bad as waking, but you easily “understand the pain” for a second and then it fades again when thinking about it.

Auditory
Sound is probably the 3rd highest ranked sense, people would feel less involved in a dream if they didn’t have sound, and this is actually an interesting thing since sound is the last sense to enter the dream state when originally falling asleep (and the first to wake up), this is why we are sensitive to sounds when sleeping, and sounds may even bleed into our dreams, other things can go into your dreams as well, but I have had a lucid dream before where the whole dream, the only thing I could hear was the podcast in my ears and not the world around me. So while you usually see and touch things in dreams, sound is the next sense that people notice, leaving taste and smell behind.

So, auditory mind body, sounds kind of weird, but actually, this is done a lot and like the others can be improved (seriously though, calm down, I will talk about improving them after I go over what all of them are, I wish you would stop hassling me). The most common mind body auditory stimulation you probably know is having a song stuck in your head. Oh man! It is bad! But seriously, you can hear the song, or at least just this 10 seconds of the song, over and over. So you may think “I am bad at visualization”, but all I have to do is say the lyrics to a song and you hear it in your head. Want to try it?

Spoiler for sounds:

But this actually doesn’t end here. Think of your mom’s voice. You probably heard it for one second and then it disappeared! Right? Hard to keep in your head, anyways, back to music. We do this a lot with music, especially when singing, playing, and especially when composing music. Try singing your favorite song, can’t you just hear the music? Don’t you pause at all the perfect places? Even if there is a 30 second riff, if I am singing my favorite song, I stop and listen to that, which is weird, since it isn’t there, I am just imagining it.

Smell/taste
So this is similar to the last one, think of things that you can smell or taste and what they are like. Heck, imagine what random things around you smell or taste like you will probably come up with something. Your mind can either make an accurate idea of what your curtains taste like, or maybe they remember from the last time you put your curtains in your mouth (just me? Fine, be that way). Yet again, it happens automatically, but when you try to get it to stay, it can be really hard to keep it there. I have some things to say about this.

So taking this into account, I think I have found out what Visualization is and how to use it. Hopefully I have convinced you that we all visualize all of our sensations all the time. We have a graphic 3D representation of the world around us in our minds, and that is an automatic function that we develop as humans. So we are, basically, taking this function and controlling it. This may seem “reckless” or “dangerous” if we break the function that it is there for, but isn’t this the same exact thing we do with dreaming? Okay? good.

So anyways, people break this function all the time and learn to bend it into ways that suit their fancy with things like sports, composing music, making dinner, drawing, or really almost any special skill you get. It all has to do with visualizing. I am again not talking in a metaphysical sense where “you can’t succeed unless you visualize yourself doing this”, but in the way that people honestly use the function with things like visualizing a drawing, visualizing the music, visualizing yourself during sports. Sports is actually a really good mixture of muscle memory and visualizing, since the fastest movements are muscle memory, but if something happens you aren’t expecting (which happens all the time in sports) your visualization reaction time is going to be a huge factor.

What does this have to do with dreams?
EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!
What do you think your dreams are made of? Not this body, or even things that this body does, but what your mind body is doing. This is the first step of incubation, and I will be doing a whole thread on Visualization Part 2: Incubation and will explain the whole thing there. If you aren’t convinced that this is helpful for LDing, then read that thread and then come back to these exercises.

So, since I am explaining everything about visualization/incubation there, I won’t explain it here. I am going to explain next how to bend this visualization. Another major key thing that needs explained here is that not every thought is visualization, just the ones that have to do with the senses or the extra senses (like imagining that you have telekinesis, some people use visual to move it, others have a tactile sensation of moving it into the air with energy). The other part of the mind is like ideas and words and things, some people put words into sight or sound before sending them out. I usually make a quick list of the things I could respond with, as well as a line of conversation that I would take it down with each answer and decide between the 20 options or so that I create before responding. So it is an almost visual conversation, but putting them into visuals would be too much to deal with, it just all pops up almost instantly from practice. So almost visualization, but not.

Okay, so we have talked about the ways that visualization is used in waking, but this thread is about how to increase your control over visualizations.

The Basics of Maxing Visualization

Spoiler for MasterMind's Post:

When it comes to visualization it's not the physical eyes that you are going to "see" with, it's the mind's eye. If I now say the word "Batman" you think of that with images because that is the language that your brain is using, images and association. So in the same way that you use the mind's eye to see the image with eyes open, you can also see it with closed eyes. It's all about shifting what you focus on. It's difficult to describe exactly how this works because in short, we don't know.

I think you can get the feeling of what I am trying to describe.

So you should not think about what you do with your eyes, it doesn't really matter, the importance lies in the focus of your awareness!
A proof for that (that you can try yourself) is that I can move my eyes around in random movements and and circles but still hold a visualization image in my mind, no matter if the eyes are opened or closed.

We can all do this simple visualization by holding a mental image on our mind for a millisecond, but when it comes to actually keep that focus most of us struggle. And the reason for that is that we are unfocused. We are raised with shifting our focus all the time, from facebook notifications to text messages etc. If you want to be able to maintain focus longer, you simply need to practise it.

A way to demonstrate that you already possess the ability to visualize, but the problem is maintaining focus, is to tell you to think about what you have done today, or to think of a memory. You are not only going to use words to describe that in your mind, you are going to use images! And by that time you are visualizing. But.. if you can't hold the images in your mind it's because you jump to another thought or image and that is why the image you tried to focus on falls apart.

You can either practise your focus directly with visualization by keeping your focus for as long as possible on an image, or you can practise meditation.
I have a guide on how to do that in my signature.

When you can easily keep a still image or a simple object in your mind's eye both while having your eyes opened and closed, then you can start using other senses and move your focus in this internally created world.

But remember to both practise your visualization skills but also your ability to focus, because if you can't focus, your visualization aren't going to be stable enough to play around with anyway. And not your dreams either for that matter.

I hope this helps and if you have more questions, ask away.

Peace!

I really like this idea, that we try to visualize, but it is fleeting because we can’t keep it in mind because it takes focus. Imagine the word “Imagine” in your head, it seems really crisp at first, but then it just fades and when you try to “look” at it, it will seem blurry, or like you aren’t seeing anything at all.

So how do we make our visuals last longer? Practice! Practice! But that being said, some things will take longer than others, and some things can boost it much much more than anything else.

In order to get better at this faster than anyone else, we will make some quick guidelines to increase our practice.

Video Game rules: energy and ability level
You only have a certain amount of energy, some things take tons of visualization energy, others take very little, while others take almost none at all. This is actually going to be pretty important. Things that are hard for you are going to take up tons of mental points and things that are easy will take up little, there is even a special group that seem to take extremely little to no effort. I will talk about these later! So anyways, it might be good for you to name the different abilities and approximate how hard it is for you.

Remember though, that doing the same easy thing over and over, like in a video game, will get exceedingly easy, to the point that it doesn’t take anything but muscle memory, but this will also minimize the experience points that it gives you for leveling up. So some hard, lots of easy, and lots of medium. haha.

There is another little hack that works like this:
If I have the options to visualize right before bed and I choose it every night, it already takes willpower energy just to start. If I already set it in my mind as something that happens the second I turn out the lights, then it will not take any willpower to start. So instead of choosing when you are going to visualize or practice things each and every day, just have a set thing that marks when you do it. This actually works for all sorts of things and is one of the reasons, I think, that naturals learn so much easier than us. Because it becomes something that they just do when the lights go out. At night, they get ready to lucid dream. There is zero pressure, there is zero will power extended. It is more like turning on a video game rather than programming one (these are both extremes, but you get the picture). This is another reason that people that leave DV after knowing how to LD, often get better faster if they don’t forget about LDing.

Timing
I am not saying not to practice visualization in the day, or really far away from sleep, but there are certain times that your visualization is just better than others. Things like a completely black room with either repeating noise or no noise is really good. If you could get your hands on a sensory deprivation tank, then I imagine that would be amazing, I have used them while visualizing, but that is for later as well.
These things can help:
Visualize during a WBTB
Visualize right after waking
Visualize during a dream
Visualize with eyes shut
Visualize one sense at a time to max one
Visualize with as many senses you can keep at once, even if they all aren't strong

These are some things that will be almost like steroids for visualization, it makes it so much more vivid and more stable visuals.

Especially the night time visualization during WBTBs, I would put this down as something you want to try once a night if you can. Things that will usually be extremely hard for you will take little to no effort here. I personally recommend sitting up for this so you can practice without falling asleep. There will be times (like when VILDing) that you will want to fall asleep visualizing, but this is about getting better at the visualization part.

Daydreaming vs Visualization
Most daydreaming is visualization, but not all of it. It is pretty easy to tell the difference when you think about it.

~HACK~
Another way to get good at a normal way of visualization is to use creativity to hack an ability you already have to change it. There are plenty of ways to do this, but here is one. I am not going to list a million since I think that creativity is part of this!

Spoiler for LucidJordan's Quote:

Another thing I would recommend would be something like feely cup, or anything of that caliber. Maybe just put your hands behind your chair and touch things, imagining what they are or put a blindfold on and put something in your hands. These kind of things being touched for a long period of time can really up your stability of an object, as well as memorizing tactile sensations of an object. A really amazing thing.

See how it takes a normal function of creating the world around you and forces it without visuals? Things like this really hack the crap out of your mind and can show you how to visualize. This momentary ability to visualize beyond yourself is actually what jump starts your muscles for certain abilities. After this, you can really start working hard on things.

This way of breaking things up is actually really important for making visuals more dreamlike and getting a really good WILD going. being able to stabilize some things and let other things form.

Two main Stabilization groups
If you remember my control thread (http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-cont...ur-dreams.html) Then you will remember that separating things into groups for your own purpose and then working on them individually in those groups can help. Then the next time, you separate it in a completely different way and do it again. Separate into each individual sense and count all effort as a positive for all things sight. Separate it only as keeping one thing stable, and count all effort as positive there as well. This mindset of getting better at a broad range of things inside of one group instead of just the one thing you are working on can really boost your later attempts. When beginning LDing, I knew I was good at dreaming and incubation, so I knew LDing would be easy, I grouped them together. With this new visualization time that I have been working hard on, I know that I have done lots of visualization that is in lots of ways unrelated to what I am doing now, but I lump them together and say "I am good at visualization!" LOL. This positive mindset and lumping together and separating and lumping is really good for keeping a positive mind.

Visualizing Group A: Stabilizing What You Visualize
Not just visuals, but stabilizing all senses is really the heart of the practice. I have heard a few people talk about their visuals switching from 1st person to 3rd person when trying to visualize, but this is just due to trying to visualize yourself doing something without doing it I think, so your mind switches it to someone else doing it. If you are trying to get 3rd person though, it might be an easy start, since mastering the easy things can help you learn the hard and the tricks for the hard. Sometimes movement can be hard for some people, sometimes stagnant can be hard for people. Depends on you! But keeping the same thing is what is wanted really, I like to imagine myself getting up from my bed and walking out of my house, flying out my window and having adventures from there. This is also how I start my WILDs, but that will be in the other thread. This needs a stable idea of how the world is, with the shifting perspective of me. So it is a stable focus, but also movement. A good thing for this is to try to imagine something that you would need to be stable in order to work with it. Like a math problem. Let’s say you know your multiplication tables like you should, but multiplying 2 x 2 in your head past that isn’t extremely easy. If you try to do this in your head, you start trying to add numbers and forget what previous numbers are, like this:
95 times 65, 5 times 5 is 25, leave the 2 at the top, leave the 5 at the bottom. 5 times 9 is 45, plus 2, 47, so 475. Then go to 6 times 5 is 30, 3 at the top 0 at the bottom… 6 times 9 is 53 plus 3, 56. So 560 plus… 475 maybe? 5600 and 475 is 6065! I made it! Feel good about this… What was the question again? I want to double check on the calculator, but I forget.
So… that takes a lot of time and words to bring this about. So a practice I got into is! Visualizing something insane, like! A piece of paper and a pencil! I write it down and voila, when I am done I can check my work even. I don’t need to remember what it is, because it is right in front of me. I couldn’t do this very well at first, but I learned with my middle of the night visuals right after waking!
I also got really into chess for a while. Visualizing is actually a huge part of chess. You have to be able to make the future board in your mind and keep it there while looking at all the different iterations and deciding on the best outcome. So one time, I was playing chess in a dream, and this gave me the idea that the chess board was completely stable the whole time, so why couldn’t it be that way in stabilizations? A DC in the dream actually made all legal moves and the board stayed there the whole time, so I can do this in waking! I did this during a late night visual right after waking and voila! I could move the pieces on the board and they stayed there, for about 2 minutes of play. Then the board started getting wobbly and I couldn’t remember where the pieces were. Haha. I started extending this until I was even able to do this in harder times to visualize throughout the day.

Visualizing Group B: Randomizing What You Visualization
“What does that even mean?” I can hear you thinking (yes… I can hear you thinking, be warned). I will explain. The main differences between Dreams and Visualization is usually the solidity of the world that you are in as well as the randomness of it. So the previous exercises are to get your solidity up, this one is to make the randomness of dreams accessible in waking. When you go up to a DC and ask him “What are you up to?” They will answer with something unknown to you, right? Or if you pull out your phone and slide through text messages or look at the pictures, aren’t you going to find random pictures usually? So this is what we are trying to accomplish in waking. Since, to most, it is generally a new concept, it means that it is a muscle that we need to jump start. The easiest way to do this is something that is generally too hard to remember or something that is random by nature. Do something like I said earlier, talk to a DC or pull out your phone. Look at a conversation between you and a friend and just read it, or just grab a book. Odds are, at first you won’t be able to do this, so then you go to the souped up times! Middle of night visuals, right after waking!
This ability is actually something that is a big part of the other threads too.

Disclaimer
You might have noticed the fatal flaw in the best time for visualization (during a WBTB), and that is that it is the same time that you really need to buckle down and remember some dreams and then try for another good set of dreams. So, a big problem really. I think though, that as long as your recall is good and you are doing more than just one WBTB a night for recall and awareness, that sacrificing one WBTB for visualization practice is worth it, especially for LDing in the long run. And I don’t think it completely nullifies the WBTB either, just the quick DEILD and a bit of recall gone. Not a great problem really.

A Final Word
I don’t have very many exercises on how to visualize, because me telling you what to do for visualizing is like me telling you what to dream about. Other people’s dreams are boring. Use your own creativity. If you feel like you don’t have enough of a base to start making your own visualization practices, then I recommend meditating for a long period of time. Eventually you will get bored and something will come up. I have insomnia, so I have often been very bored, so when I was about 8, Toy Story 2 came out. Insomnia struck that night, so I couldn’t figure out what to do… I started thinking about the movie. I played it from beginning to end in my head and it took about 10 minutes. I started doing that with every movie I knew to pass the time and it became a bit of a habit. So now when I watch a movie, I rethink over that movie over and over and think about the plot and the side characters and ideas of all the characters. I think about the movie from a director’s standpoint, I think of the movie from a critic standpoint, from someone that it is now their favorite movie, someone that it is now their least favorite movie. It has given me the ability to remember almost everything about the movies that I watch, even if I watch only once. I usually try to watch a movie 2 times if I can though, and the second time is when I spend all my thinking about it.

This is something that I really enjoy and has really made my visualization much more mine. The Best thing you can do for visualization is to actually sit down and do it! HAVE FUN DURING OR IT WILL BE EVEN HARDER!

This being said, if you want to have more "exercises for visualizing" instead of coming up with your own, I can make a part 3 for visualization drills, but I honestly think that coming up with your own would be extremely helpful for you. Some interesting exercises that I would consider to almost all be a form of visualization lay here:
Dream Yoga

MAX
The question you guys are probably wondering, is: "What is the max level of visualization one can reach", and right now, my level has increased tremendously, but I am not quite at the max. Right now, within 10 minutes of sitting down for a visualization, I can enter into a lucid dream, any time of day. I will be explaining this in my new WILD thread that will come out in the next few weeks. I am hoping to be able to, with persistent practice, take this down to an almost instantaneous WILD at any time.

Spoiler for External Links:

TL;DR
Visualization is similar to dreams
We have "two" bodies, our waking one and visualized one
We visualize all the time, and use it for lots of things, like when thinking about moving or calculating movements
We can bend the visualization that we use naturally and use it to get better at normal visualization
We only have a certain amount of energy (like in a video game) that we can use, and different things take different amounts of energy at different times and depending on how we use them.
We can wake up in the middle of the night for a big boost to our visualizing ability
We should break visualization sessions into a specific thing so we can practice a wide range of visualization
We should visualize to make things more stable
We should visualize to make things random
Make your own exercises for Visualization and make it fun, trying to cover the fundamentals can take too much energy at times, so using "bending" and maxing of some of them can help you to move forward very easily.

**kir4ee** · 05-09-2017 09:40 AM

Thanks a lot !!! this is a big help im already doing it daily but sometimes i fall a sleep because im tired and have hard time keeping it up cant wait for part 2

**pdunc** · 05-09-2017 01:55 PM

Thanks Sensei. Looking forward to reading through the entire series. Got to admit though, it would be helpful to me if you do in fact at some point provide a summary of drills/exercises for working on visualizing. Being new to LDing with only a few LD's under my belt, I'm trying to prioritize the exercises I take on to do on a daily basis, looking for the ones that are most beneficial to me. Primarily because there are only so many hours during the day that I can devote to lucid dreaming exercises and there are so many good tutorials with their own exercises to work on. Thank you again for this series. I can see that you have put a lot of thought and work into it. I'm sure that it will be of great value to me and many others who frequent this site.

**Nfri** · 05-11-2017 10:16 AM

love it

**Sensei** · 05-11-2017 12:32 PM

Thanks for the replies! Part 2 is up. Working on part 3 now (exercises)
http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...ncubation.html
@kiree
Keep it up! How much sleep do you get at night?
@pdunc
Thanks.

I'll put up part 3 soon! I personally recommend learning from others, but build your own foundation. I will talk about this during the drills part.
@nfri
Thanks nfri!

**kir4ee** · 05-11-2017 02:47 PM

Originally Posted by Sensei

Thanks for the replies! Part 2 is up. Working on part 3 now (exercises)
http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...ncubation.html
@kiree
Keep it up! How much sleep do you get at night?
@pdunc
Thanks.

I'll put up part 3 soon! I personally recommend learning from others, but build your own foundation. I will talk about this during the drills part.
@nfri
Thanks nfri!

It depends but i would have to say 7.5-8.5 hours of sleep i think its good the only problem i have is the fear of insomnia and that fear is bad for my lucid dreams so i try to lucid dream 1-2 times in a week if i find a way around insomnia i could try more but also when i do get insomnia it usually results in a WILD but i lose too much time and i feel tired the next day :/ thanks for asking

**Rebon** · 05-13-2017 08:53 PM

Great. Your stuff is realy fun to read

**fogelbise** · 06-09-2017 11:16 PM

This is a great tutorial Sensei! You have a gift…a number of gifts actually! I hope to see you around the forums posting more gems!

**oneironautics** · 06-17-2017 10:14 AM

Great Tutorial Senset, I've been having a weird problem recently were i can remember the whole story line of my dreams but no visuals so this will be perfect practice. Thanks