Sivason's Guide to Visualization and Other Dream Yoga Topics Q & A

[Sivason]

I will start by just editing answers I have allready posted and trying to fit them together in a way that I hope will be worth reading. I am more than willing to respond to any questions. I may add items to this as subjects come up. The first part is to show how you can train in visualization and use the skill to enter WILDs. Then I will throw in some random stuff, just to see if it intrests anyone. Visualization Training: I have developed methods for training the portion of my brain used in lucid dreams, by recreating and refining dream images while fully awake. Where ever I got it from, I have used it for 20+ years and it has massively improved every aspect of my lucid dream path. There are many ways to go about this and I encourage you to come up with a few that suite you through experimentation. I will share my two favorites with you so you can get started. This will make WILDing and DILDing much, much easier, I am actually suprised it does not get talked about on this forum too much. What it will do is give you an active way to develop the part of your brain that controls dreams. An activity you can do while awake to furthur your goal other than endless reality checks. Here is the idea. Take sight for instance. In waking life, light energy in various wave lengths hit the rods and cones in your eye. That causes neurons to fire and the message goes to the brain creating your visual perception. In a dream there is no light energy. Something must stimulate the neurons, but what? You are going to learn how to stimulate the visual perception with out light energy. The untrained mind has only the limited random ability to do this, like in a random dream. You can hone in on the something that fires the neurons and develop it like a muscle, through repeated use. Every sense can be harnessed the same way. The sense of touch in waking life is from a object or heat/cold exciting a receptor that then sends a nerve inpulse. In a dream no object is needed. What then is the source of the nerve impulse? Again you can learn to hone in on that something, and develop it. The end result is that the parts of the brain used in dreaming become highly developed. 1) Visual. Lay in bed in the dark while fully awake and aware. Close your eyes. It is not really black is it? If you only see black, be patient, most people will start to see tiny specks of color or even blurs and dots of color. Perfectly normal at this point. I have only met one person who could not see some tiny flecks moving around. Step one: Just watch them for a couple nights. Become more aware that the colors are there. Step two: Try to cause one color to be more prevelant. Some colors will be more natural for you. If the most common random color is blue, start with blue, and so on. While watching the normal flecks, start thinking about things of that color. For blue maybe day dream about looking into the ocean. For red maybe day dream about looking into a glass of red wine. Watch the visual field as you do this. You should notice that the amount of that color will increase, maybe even appearing as whole sections of the visual field having that color of light shone on them. This may take awhile, or be very easy. Step three: Get to where you can increase the amount of two more colors, and try switching back and forth between them. Now more red, switch to visualizing blue and so on. Step four: Try to cover the entire visual field with mostly one color. Step five: Now picture common geometric shapes. For instance, two crossing lines, or a circle. At first any color randomly, then when you get that, the color you choose. Step six: Get to where you can create a shape of a chosen color on a back ground of a chosen color. After that make up more steps on your own. 2) Tactile (touch) Lay in bed fully awake. Step one: Try to feel your fingers without touching them. You are recieving impulses from every part of your body, but filter out most of it. Get to where you can preceive each of the fingers of you right hand with out moving them. Step two: Slowly open and close your right hand. Really pay attention to how it feels. Try to experience it in fine detail. Now stop actually doing the movement. Try to remember how it felt. Go back and forth between doing the movement and trying to recreate the feeling of doing it. Step three: after you can actually clearly picture how the motion should feel, try visualizing each finger moving one at a time. Go back and forth between really moving it and trying to recreate the feeling of moving it. Step four: Now do the same thing, but move your whole arm and hand. A simple waving motion or something like that. Go back and forth between actually making the motion, and trying to recreate the feeling. After you get that far, make up other similar moves on your own. Be patient, some people will be able to do these things in as little as a week, while others may struggle with it for much longer. You are trying to exercise the portion of your brain that creates dreams. No matter how long it takes to get through the two exercises I just listed the whole process is actively developing the needed portion If you don't see colors, but you can see something like light, start there. The concept is of course to develop these internalized dream senses. I assume every person will start with being better at one thing than another. If seeing color is difficult, but seeing light is easier you could skip color for now and work on making the lights form a circle and so on. When that portion of your brain is sitmulated to develop its self, all other imagery manipulations will be easier. Maybe you work on it for a week and can make some basic shapes or whatever, then go back to color and see if you have developed enough skill to easily start that trick. When you get good at this stuff it can be practiced anywhere, when you have a queit moment. When you first start you need to try to make up mental tricks that help you picture in your minds eye or imagination the color or shape. I used tricks like day dreaming about colorful scenes or objects. If I wanted green I may picture emeralds of a field of mown grass. Then when I was ready for shapes I would daydream, while passively watching for anything to appear, I would daydream I was looking at a clock face or a ball or the moon, while expecting the shape of a circle to appear. At first the circle would just be a blob but the sides would try to round out, then eventually a round blob, later a image of a circle but so vague I thought maybe it is not really there,,,and eventually, after a few weeks for your brain to remodel and expand in the dream portion, a perfect round image of light floating and trying to swirl and dissolve. Now for exercise you can try to get a specific shape of a specific color. A green triangle, day dream about a christmas tree. A yellow circle, day dream about the sun,, and so on. This exercise should be given no less than 3 weeks of time, because when you exercise a new part of the brain it takes at least two weeks for the brain to re-wire the neurons. Make up your own methods as you go. You are developing a new skill and as you practice your brain becomes wired for this. In the end you will not need to daydream or try at all, your brain will have learned to show any basic image you desire. Here is an example of how vivid and controlled you can become once the re-wiring is done. After about 2 years or however long it takes, you can close your eye in a classroom or at work, and in less than 1 minute create a clear glowing triangle or circle of yellow on a red background and switch back and forth with other shapes and colors. This takes time, at that point three or four combinations will be pretty easy, but not everything will work without much effort. In the end, say 10 years of practice, you can close your eyes and instanly create a clear glowing image of a yellow triangle point down, over a blue triangle point up, on a red background, with vivid colors and well defined images. After 20+ years I can do even weirder stuff with little to no effort. You may get frustrated if nothing happens the first week, but after the second week it should start becoming pretty intense. How to use Visualization to Help You WILD: Every one should attempt to initiate the dream. The WILD procedures may end up causing you to not know you are in a lucid dream. If you focus on the WILD process after you reach SP you may hit a lucid state and not realize it. When you have reached a place, where you would have to focus to move your hand you are in the first state of SP; you could move but not with out mental effort. Don't worry about SP after that. Begin at that point just start pretending you are in a lucid dream. You need to initiate the dream! Not just hope for it to happen. You may have been all the way to a begining of a LD, but not realized it because you are waiting for something visual to happen. I use these tricks to enter WILDs. After I reach SP I start to create the beginning of a dream whether my brain is ready or not. Commonly I hit SP then uses my tactile sense to create a feeling of my arm moving. Then I use visual skills to create two intersecting glowing lines with a thick end to represent looking down at my arm and hand. I try to sincronise both senses, so that I get a low grade lucid dream of my moving my arm and watching it. After that is easy, I develop the hand a little and recreate the experience of moving my hand and making basic jestures and can see this in low definition and really feel like I am in a weak LD. If I do this as a WBTB with at least 5 hours sleep, I have amazing luck with my WILDs. Usually at this point I relax and watch for a minute and my brain is happy enough to start a basic LD such as vague images of a room or forest and me having a poorly defined dream body I can explore with. Then you can walk write into the first stages of REM as soon as it starts. You must keep thinking about this being a dream. Build up your imagination, try to see something basic, like your hands. If you then get blurs and shadows to move around when you try to look at your hands, you are doing it right. You are probably in a lucid dream by this state, just a very very mild one. Now, nurse it alond slow. Feel yourself walking and look at anything you can picture you may see in a dream. You will now start to see images arising. Don't break it by getting excited. WILDs take patients. You are hopefully less aware of your body now, but may still be thinking rationally. Just keep up a simple simulated feeling of walking and any other motion you want while causualy watching the field of vision go in the first stages of HH. As soon as you really feel like you are doing an action and are seeing blurs, you have actually entered a weak LD. Just gently picturing what you should be seeing, like a forest trail. At this point you may suddenly realize you are in an actual dream! Then do all the things you have learned about like your RC and stabilizing. Have fun. Visualization Skills and the Chakras Do not follow a book as far as what color you should see or anything specific about chakras. They are guidlines based on common preceptions others have had. When you are in the lower sacral chakra, you may see it as blue or yellow or anything, you may not even precieve it as being at a certain point in your body. It is a fundamental part of you, based on your connection to your body and the physical world. The next one may again appear a diffferant color than a book says, it may not seem to be located where they say, but it is a fundamental part of you that is related to your drives in the world. If you want to feel it on the most basic level, let yourself get hungry or thirsty. You will in someway be in touch with that part of your spirit that guides you to seek out things in the physical world. Chakras, humans also are not readily capable of understanding their own personal connection to God in the extreme Macro picture. We do the same type of thought and thus break our divine connection into Seven easily explored areas. Lowest Chakra: We exist in the physical world. Second:We are driven by forces of nature (hunger, reproduction) Third: We can exurt our intentions on the world, changin thought into action. Forth: We are not just physical, we are also emotional. Fifth: We are not alone and interact with other, emotion being. Sixth: We are not just physical and emotional, but intellectual, which is some thing new, not directly realated to emotion of physics. Here we precieve and interprate. Seven: We feel there is another thing above physical, emotional, and mental. That thing is a mystery, but we call it in broad terms spiritual. Through meditation and Kundalini we can focus on knowing ourselves at each of this divisions. That is the basic breakdown. The mystical experience of Kundalini allows us to precieve an energy type in seperation from the big picture and then experience the rise of Kundalini which creates the grand picture of who we are. There are more Chakra, and minor ones. More aspects that one can invision, but are a bit out of the easy 1, 2, 3 breakdown. For instanse the trait given to the eigth: we can be in contact with the rest of the spiritual beings in a way that does not require the physical world, a preception of interconnectedness. At that energy level you will feel as if you recieve knowledge from the universe at large. Some will be truth, but being human we will flavor it withour lower chakra, like thought pattern, emotional standing, and our basic drives. To a person who actually has undergone a kundalini awakening, knowledge can be recieved 'from God' but it is not guarenteed to be 100%, you may pick up on truths shared by many beings, but that is vauge and flawed in some way, you may get a perfect message from that 8th chakra, but in trying to bring it back down into the physical world, it is colored by your own experience and pre-concevied mental modells. Sleep Paralysis Clarified: I am reading alot of posts lately where people seem a little confused about what to expect from SP and how to induce it. The stuff you hear about that sounds extreme, is a bit of a medical disorder that most people do not have. Some people are unable to move and get scared, but for most people it is not a very intense paralysis. You may get to SP and never think you made it. Here is the thing, you will almost always be ABLE to move in SP if you focus on doing so, but, you are likely to break SP if you do! SP for me is just, when I get the heavy feeling of sleep relaxation, and a casual thought about scratching my nose is not enough to make it happe., I can still by making concious effort make my arm work. If you are in a dreamy state and start to have dream like drifting awareness or seeing odd colors or feel tingling strange vibrations you are probably in SP! Don't move to test this! If you move and are not skilled enough you will break back out of SP. It feels like any move would take your focus. If you need to move and are getting a feel for it, you may be able to gently and gradually move to scratch or turn or shift and not break SP. My whole point here is you have probaly reached SP and not known it, because you are looking for a true rigid paralysis, and as soon as you try to test it, you break the SP. On Finding a Dream Guide or Spirit Animal to Teach You While LDing. Here are my suggestions on how to start. These lucid skills may be allready something you can do, or you may need a lot of time to build them. 1) develop a dream voice. Not just thinking and having DCs respond to your un voiced words. Start with a simple sylable like the word 'Hey!' When you stop to stablize set a goal of yelling 'hey' very loud and having the sound be something you can actually hear. 2) get to wear you can white out the scene. Think of the first Matrix movie and the training matrix. You need to be able to make objects and DCs fade into the white back ground. 3) learn to pay attention to the distortions you will notice if you try, in the construction of the dream. Look at a tree for instance. Try to pick up flaws in the picture. The air is all warped, or the tree has a halo. 4) Remember that the guides will not be to willing to take you as a student if you are acting out all crazy and lustful or violent when they watch you. They probably will watch you for a few months or a yeear before they make up their minds on helping you or not. Ok, here is how you can combine these things to have your first encounters with spirit guides and animals. Practice your control and stablizing skills until you have a clear voice and can make most DCs and objects blur out, or just erase them. Now when you go to sleep use a mneumonic mantra like "I am ready for a guide." when you get into an LD each time you stablize call out to the far hills or the sky, some thing like "I am ready!!!" You should be able to really hear it loud and vividly. This will eventually attract attention to you. If a guide or totem animal responds, it may follow you and cause you to feel paranoid. Put up with the creepy feeling of being watched and just keep calling out everytime you stablize. Now, when you feel something in your dream that may be a guide or animal totem, erase thescenery using the whole matrix white room kind of trick. The entity is likely creating a wall or tree to watch you from, take it away. So youtry to erase the scene and a fox, or man, or whatever may appear. Try to erase them. If theyare real you willnot do much more than cause them to ripple a tiny bit. Now lookat them while trying to see the random dream distortions. They look different than DCs. You have to be there and see onebefore you will know what I mean. Watch for them to make eye contact. My DCs almost never make direct eye contact with me, but entities almost allways do. If they make eye contact, you have done it! There is a special magic in the eye contact. Now say out loud something like "I'm ready" or "teach me." If they run away or try to hide again, don't push it, just know that they are still not sure about you yet. If you get good at dreaming, it can be used as a portal to what are basically mini-dimensions. A location established by powerful beings. The nature of these can be amazingly varied. You may be contacted by someone who notices your developing powers. and with out you knowing it, be escorted to a simple entry level mutual play ground. Other dreamers may be there as well as basically pre-school teachers of the dream area. You will not be allowed to run recklessly through someone else nice dream city or floating island or what have you. You may find that your lovely powers to control everything are seriously dampened. This is because of two things. First such a playground is a shared experience based on the thoughts of all the other people and beings. You can start a fire in your hand for instance, but may not be able to make someone disappear. Likely they are looking at you like your crazy, because they are just as confused as you are. The second factor is that these locations will have established physical rules that dictate the shared experience. They will likely have an established down direction, an outer boundry, and may even have weather. These factors can not be modified by the students. What happens in a place like this can be as varied as imagination. The instructors will likely throw small challenges at you to see how you react. Then do not attempt to be the God of the playground, but make your best attempt at understanding what the theme of the place is and try to participate. It may be that someone is giving levitation lessons to those who can stay focused, or that you are supposed to learn to interact through some sort of game, like capture the flag. Sounds very, very crazy, but why would I lie. If you have gotten to one of these places, you are about to experience some fanastically weird and confusing stuff. Bear with it, even if some of the instructors keep you confused and do upsetting things. They must test you for many years, before you will be allowed to run free in a larger setting like an established city. These realms are not in a form your brain can really understand, so your own interpratation of confused input determines how you will see the people, items, and events in these dreams. If a being (who is not really human) is kind, female, older than you, and protective, you may visualize that it is your mother or favored school teacher from when you were five. The other dreamers may have seen him as an old friend of their own. If you come to an outer boundery, your brain trys to make sense of something it does not understand, so you may see a cliff, a wall, a chainlink fence, a force field, while the dreamer right next to you sees it as a road closed sign or something. Very much a case of the dreamer's interpratation affecting their experience. If your journey here is like mine was, you will make an ass out of yourself dozens of times, and be horribly confused 90+% of the time for a few years. A Simple Way I Increase Number of DILDs Ok, Here is a very simple method that I use. It helps me have lots of DILDs, maybe 3 to 5 a week that are any good and a handful of small 1 minute or less ones. As I am relaxing and getting about half way to sleep, just when I feel any sign of driftiness, I do a trick with my breathing. You want this process to be rythmic and hypnotising. As I breath in I think to myself (internal dialog, like talking to yourself, not just thinking) "I AM". On my exhalation I think the word "Dreaming" So I fall asleep to a meditative chant, of "I Am Dreaming" timed to the rythm of my natural breaths. It takes me anywhere from a few, to hundreds of breath cycles, to be so far gone I can not focus on anything. Then I sleep. I have now said "I Am Dreaming" to myself tens of thousands of times over the 23 years I have been lucid dreaming. It is now only natural that that thought pop into my head any time something strange happens. Hope that is an idea some of you can have some success with. I have varied the words to keep me from being board or to create different effects. If I find I keep forgeting to stabelize I may switch to "Look At",,,"Your Hands" or something like that for a few days. My Very Effective and Simple Reality Check This is one of the only RC I use anymore, and it is very effective. I will admit that it may be best for people who have already had a couple dozen LDs, but it won't hurt a beginner to try it. I think beginners should not stop doing there current RCs because active ones make you pay attention to the concept. A problem with RCs is they may be inconvinent or make you look crazy. I say this is maybe for slightly more advanced dreamers, because using magical type powers in a dream, takes a little practice. I have practiced levitating in my dreams and can always do it anymore if I try. I do not tend to use super human powers by just imagining it. It seems like I feel a certain way when making a power manifest, kind of like energy flowing through me. So, to levitate I kind of bring a feeling up from below me that lifts me up like on an updraft. Now that I can almost always levitate in my LDs I use it for my RC. Many times a day, any time I think about it or see anything even a little odd, I attempt to levitate. I just picture that feeling of an updraft I feel in the dreams. Guess what? It never works, even a little, if I am awake. Often, I see something odd, and naturally try to levitate, and wow, sure enough I lift right off the ground! Then, bang, I am lucid and floating 2 feet off the ground in a LD. The great thing about this RC is I can do it even a dozen times a day, without having to move at all. Even, in a crowd, I just try to float, and no one has a clue. this one should never take place of someone's current RCs unless they have prefected any one of the super powers. It won't hurt for someone to add it in, but you must be able to always levitate when in an LD, for it to take the place of all other RCs. It would also work for anyone who has perfected any magic in their LDs. For instance, if they can always create a fire in the palm of their hand, that could be the simple RC. While sitting in English lit, they picture a ball of fire, if it happens, they become lucid.

[Duck]

Awesome read! You have a lot of insightful thoughts, I have to say, even though I'm still a beginner. I'm surely gonna try the visualization technique.

[Robot_Butler]

Thanks for putting this together. I really like your description of tactile visualization. I think this is a tremendously useful skill to learn. I've always believed that this is one of the main reasons why energy work leads to such profound experiences. Your awareness is the energy you are imagining. You learn to move your attention and awareness around and through your body. With experience, you can even move it away from your body.

[insideout]

Interesting stuff. I need to remember this and try out the visualization training. I'll add it to my regular meditation time. I remember your previous post about finding a dream guide. I had had a dream where I felt a presence watching me and making me nervous. Since then I have asked for dream guides in lucid dreams with the expectation that I am already being watched. In my last lucid dream a strange figure appeared. It had no face, long skinny limbs, and held a branch with little flames on the ends. When it talked, though, it felt like it was just saying what I wanted it to say, so it didn't feel like much of a guide.

[Ctharlhie]

Thanks for putting this together. I really like your description of tactile visualization. I think this is a tremendously useful skill to learn. I've always believed that this is one of the main reasons why energy work leads to such profound experiences. Your awareness is the energy you are imagining. You learn to move your attention and awareness around and through your body. With experience, you can even move it away from your body. I agree, when people like Robert Bruce talk about the energy body the phenomenon they're referring to is the brain's body image (the thing that let's you know where your arms and legs are when you're not looking at them), in an OBE this body image becomes dissociated from the physical body, giving rise to the illusion that you have literally projected out of body. Through energy work and tactile imagery we become more aware and in tune with our mobile body image.

[Spyguy]

Definitely going to try the visualization. Congratulations on becoming a DVA teacher by the way! Judging from this read you have some awesome insights, so I'll be joining your class

[LucidCorso]

I will be trying the visualisation trick. Also I feel a lot better about what you said about SP because I always get to the deep relaxation and tingly feeling but always seem to try and move to test it, thanks a lot!

[faceonmars]

Visualization works. If anyone is having a hard time inducing a LD I would advise them to try visualizing. The subject of your visualization is up to you. Whatever makes you feel good... a place, an event... something calming. Turn on some very soft music and visualize someone ice-skating to the music. This is the easiest way I know of lucid dream induction. Does it work everytime? No. Nothing does. But it does work occasionally.

[satsujin]

I was able to induce SP for the first time last night. At least, I think feeling very fast vibrations in my chest counts as one. I was also able to slightly create vibes in other areas by doing energy work then. I tried visualizing but the most I could see was dark gray which in context of the surrounding black MAY be defined as white. Tried visualizing a Greco Roman column but not much success. Still it was only my first night so there is a lot of opportunities ahead. When you say visdualize do u mean in mind's eye or an actual image in the blackness in front of your eyes?

[Sivason]

It may start as imagination/ mind's eye, but what yo are training for is actual imagery that is perceived the same as if you were looking at the object. Think of how in a dream the stuff is imagination, but it is processed as actual visual stimuli. That is what you are looking for. It may tke weeks to develop, but you can develop the ability to make 'dream images' appear in the dark or with eyes closed.

[TDHXIII]

Your take on dream guides sounds different from what i usually read on many tutorials for finding a DG, are you referring to another thing or is it the same?

[Sivason]

Your take on dream guides sounds different from what i usually read on many tutorials for finding a DG, are you referring to another thing or is it the same? I am not referring to a creation of your unconscious mind that you interact with, as in standard psychology. I am actually talking about entities that exist with or with out you. To many this falls in the class of supernatural.

[RelaxAndDream]

Thank you sivason. i really enjoyed reading this thread. it has a lot of insight and knowledge in this lines!