Hi All,
This is my first post, so I hope I'm putting this in the right spot. I have been lucid dreaming for a number of years now and have only recently begun to learn more. Something that I have been slowly training myself to do is access the visualization powers of the mind exhibited in lucid dreaming, but during waking life. For lack of a better term, I call it "lucid visualization."
The basic idea comes from this simple exercise. Go to a quiet room with low light. You should be able to see things easily but when you close your eyes you should see black rather than red (i.e. light isn't illuminating your eyelids). Hold out one hand and stare at it for a few moments. Move it around slowly. Take some time to observe how your hand looks as it takes different positions and how it feels as you do it. Keep moving your hand and close your eyes. This is where things get a little complicated.
Don't try to visualize your hand in the classic sense - instead, try to "see through" your eyelids to observe your hand moving. At first it will probably not work - keep trying. Eventually you should start to see the outline of your hand moving - as if you are seeing right through your eyelids. It will probably be a faint outline, but you will see that it moves remarkably similarly to your actual hand.
With practice and concentration, you should be able to enter a fuller state of visualization. After a few weeks I was able to look at the objects in my living room, look at my hand, start to visualize the room and my hand, then get up and walk around with a pretty good approximation of where things were. I will warn you that this can be a bit dangerous - things don't always correspond exactly and you are bound to run into things initially.
Once you get really good at this, you may even start to bring in some completely fictional elements a la lucid dreaming. The visualization, for me, is much more stable than a dream, but it is also much harder to call things out of my unconscious. I am able to visualize with a fair degree of accuracy static shapes and designs, but people are still out of the question.
I am currently working on using this visualization to "extract" things from my mind via drawing them. I sit at a table with a piece of paper and visualize it in my head. Once it's vivid, I envision a complex design of some sort on the piece of paper and "trace" it with my hand. At first the drawings turned out very distorted, but recently they have been getting better and better - to the point where I'm much better at drawing with my eyes closed than with them open.
Has anyone here ever heard of this technique? If so, I would love to hear more. I enjoy visualization quite a bit more than lucid dreaming now, as I am a terrible visual artist and it shows the promise of being able to unlock some hidden potential. If you have questions regarding how to start doing this, please let me know!