Well, this is a double post but I think I should give an update.
This morning I attempted this technique and found some interesting results.
First of all, movement is definitely helpful. Walking around (in your imagination) tends to accelerate the process immensely. I think it has something to do with the fact that the human brain is better at concentrating on a moving object than a stationary one. Movement also engages the tactile sense which is, of course, crucial.
Now, there is one hiccup that I should tell you about. First, let me say that there appear to be two different ways that the mind visualizes a scene. There's the conscious way, wherein the entire scene is buffered into working memory and all updates are done there, and there's the way dreams do it, wherein the scene is streamed from long term memory into working memory continuously. The only way this technique can work is if you can convince your brain to render a scene using the streaming method. This can only be done when you're experiencing HI, which is why this technique works well when you've just woken up. Luckily, it's easy to tell when you're consciously rendering a scene and when you're streaming a scene. When it's conscious, it takes great effort to rotate a complex object, and the scene itself is divided into several objects that must be individually updated consciously. When the mind is streaming, the scene updates itself seamlessly and effortlessly and the whole experience feels much smoother.
Now that I've explained that, let me tell you about the problem I encountered. If you can get your brain to start streaming, you must be careful not to overload the the Flash player, to extend the analogy. Think of a Flash or Quicktime player playing a video. If you look at the bottom you'll see how much of the video has been "buffered". You can fast forward the video to a point, but if you try to go past the end of the buffer, it crashes. This is similar to what I experienced this morning. You can walk around in your little imaginary house, but don't walk too quickly; you'll be asking for more information than can be streamed in, and the dream will collapse to a simple daydream, which is useless.
So, to sum up, this technique does work well as long as you don't walk around too quickly or get yourself into a complex situation. Now, once the dream begins in earnest, you're not nearly as restricted. You just gotta be careful in those first moments.
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