Originally Posted by
ThisWitheredMan
It has been almost one year since I began meditating regularly, and about two years since I started taking acid/mushrooms and taking an interest in visualization and mental metaprogramming and that sort of thing, paying attention to my thought processes and such, and I've noticed a really interesting, dramatic transition in how my memory works. For most of my life my memories and thoughts were pretty much restricted to vague conceptualizations. For example, I could look at my desk, then close my eyes and have a general idea of what things were in what positions, and even have a sort of CONCEPTUAL understanding of what their appearance was, but I could never drum up any sort of image visualization.
Now I can visualize just about anything. I can re-experience tastes, sounds, sights, even feelings, textures, etc. To be clear, this is not 100% 'real' like it is when I'm lucid dreaming. These things all exist in my "mind's eye", as it were, but they exist there VERY VIVIDLY. If I picture an orange, imagine peeling it and eating it, I can ALMOST, but not quite, feel the tingle in my nose from the smell, and my mouth waters like crazy. Damn, now I really want an orange... The best way I can think to describe it is that when I imagine or visualize things, I tune into an imaginary duplicate of myself, who senses everything as utterly vivid, but the tuning is weak. It's like slipping just 1% into a lucid dream, if that makes sense. I can picture, say, a green field, and experience it QUITE vividly through a sort of alternate, imaginary sensorium, but the experiences in that sensorium never bleed into this one. I never ACTUALLY taste or smell the orange, though it feels ALMOST like I do.
Something I discovered that blew my mind at the time and is still impressive to me is this visualization trick. I'm curious if it works this vividly for others, you folks should try it and let me know? The idea is, imagine yourself standing in front of a door, and tell yourself in simple terms what is going to be on the other side of that door, then imagine opening the door. For example, if I say, "There's going to be a big dramatic church behind this door," when I 'open' it, my mind generates a complete building with quite a lot of detail AUTOMATICALLY, pews, pillars, stained glass windows, etc., much like in dreaming. I never noticed this prior, and I'm sure everyone can do it, but something about it impresses the hell out of me.
Within the past couple days I've begun making a concerted effort to Astral Project based on how easy it was to get into Lucid Dreaming regularly once I gave it a serious effort. Today when I did it I experienced something new. I've always gotten interesting and vivid hypnagogic imagery when I manage to stay conscious during the initial falling-asleep process, but it was always sort of vague flashes, and generally consisted of shapes and patterns. Today, however, when I was trying to project, it was fairly different. In the blackness of my vision I'd see light forms appear, and then those forms would abruptly become windows through which I could *see* with utter clarity and vividness scenes. I spun around a mesa in a vast desert, saw a strange dining room/coffee shop type thing, and a variety of other really vivid, LIVE and moving images, as though peering directly into a dream. I wasn't able to shift into these or anything, but it was really interesting. Like you say, acillis, if I would attempt to move or focus my eyes or do just about anything at all, it would immediately collapse back to darkness. However, you may be relieved to know that I was QUITE stoned while doing that this morning and that I smoke quite a bit of weed, so I don't think it really has any actual limiting effect on these sorts of things.
