Can everyone visualise?

Now I was reading the 100% lucid post by Danatoth (thanks for the tip btw) and it came to my attention that some people have trouble visualising or cannot visualise at all.

Now pardon my ignorance, but I presumed that everyone could visualise. You see, I can visualise very well, and I just presumed this was normal. I'll give you an example: Now I am sitting in front of this computer, yet I am also imagining running along a rooftop. I can feel the impact that the roof makes on my feet, I can hear and feel the gravel on it's surface. I can feel my own movements as if I am doing them now. I can feel the cold air on my side and my forehead clammy with the sweat of running.

Now you may well ask me if I can visualise this during the day, why do I wish to lucid dream? Well, when I imagine things, it is physically impossible to lose control of every aspect of it, every action or sense is entirely deliberate and requires processing by my mind. Lucid Dreams however are not under my direct control, I can delve into them and control aspects if I wish to, but elsewhere the world goes about in a pseudo-random manner. This is what I foremost love about lucid dreams.

How well can you visualise? I am very interested to hear from you. I still presume it is an ability that we all share to an equal extent, but I am still wary of making presumptions.

So can anyone enlighten me further?

This is a fascinating concept you brought up. I also assumed we all had about the same ability to visualise.

I can also imagine running along a rooftop in my "mind's eye". Its really weird now that I think about it. Even while I am typing, I can imagine this 'rooftop' scene, while still typing.

I wonder how many 'visualisations' it is possible to run at the same time. Could I be imagining playing the guitar on a beach, whilst also visualising running along a rooftop, all while typing this? It appears that the answer is yes.

I think that the more you concentrate on it, the more lucid it becomes.

But it is only in dreaming, or lucid dreaming, or when falling into a dream, that the images that we are imagining become fully fleshed out and realistic. There is a bit of dialogue in the movie "waking life" that talks about certain hormones that make you hallucinate, that make images that you imagine appear fully realistic.

Perhaps your ability to lucid dream depends on your ability to control your "mind's eye."

Thanks for such a quick reply, Neil.

It seems you have a more powerful mind eye than me (or more of them) bacuse I am having difficulty with the typing-rooftop-beach scenario. It seems like my minds eye is trying to make the illusion that it is attempting it by quickly switching back and forth between the two scenes, but somehow my head has pointed out that fact and trying to squeeze more scenes into it just complicates matters.

Perhaps my mind needs more RAM :D

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Originally posted by Identity X
Now you may well ask me if I can visualise this during the day, why do I wish to lucid dream? Well, when I imagine things, it is physically impossible to lose control of every aspect of it, every action or sense is entirely deliberate and requires processing by my mind. Lucid Dreams however are not under my direct control, I can delve into them and control aspects if I wish to, but elsewhere the world goes about in a pseudo-random manner. This is what I foremost love about lucid dreams.

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BINGO to that! I've been trying to fix on the exact wording that explains why LDs are levels above visualising. Thanks for that!

As for visualising, I can do it, but I have to really concentrate to get intense details. For example, when I read a book, it takes me a long time because the imagery doesn't just come automatically. So yeah, I guess I'm one of those slow ones. :? But fortunately I am able to LD pretty well. Maybe I'm just a little ADD, hehe.

No, not everybody can visualise. I can't.

I like your book example OpheliaBlue! That is why books are so much better than movies.

I find that I get totally sucked into them and my imagination goes wild!

I can usually get myself fully involved in visualization.

Young-uns cover your ears now.

Think of masterbation. It is usually accompanied by intense visualiztion.

I can visualize but BARELY! I have trouble visualizing even simple things. The example you used about the roof one, I can't do that. Not even close. For me that's too much to be concentrating all at once.

BTW does anybody know is meditation improves your visualizing skill? I would think so, but Im not sure.

I have trouble visualizing. For those that can, can you simply close your eyes and concentrate on something and you actually see that object, enough that you can describe what you see rather than just imagining it and making up the details as you go? Because this is how it is for me as I sit here right now and close my eyes all I can really see is blackness no matter how much I concentrate on any one scene.

~Corbin

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Originally posted by IAmCorbin
...enough that you can describe what you see rather than just imagining it and making up the details as you go?...\"

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You know, that's probably not a bad idea at all! For those of us a bit on the slow side, we can just focus on the black emptiness. Then pick an object and verbally describe it first, and possibly a clear vision will follow?

I dunno, but I will definately try that when my visualization abilities are being particularly stubborn. Thanks for the idea, Corbin!!

I can visualise faily well, if I am asked to visualise an elaborate scene (such as running along arooftop) I find it easy, the whole scene is there in my minds eye very crealy. But try visualising a colour, just a block of any colour for longer than a second or two...i find it virtually impossible.

I have been doing some visualisation exercises linked to dreams that involve visualising each colour of the rainbow in order (red to purple) before going to sleep.

The best way I find of doing this is to imagine something that is the same colour (like a red bus, and orange etc...) or I imagine myself painting a blank canvas that colour. If I try to just imagine the colour on its own it is too difficult to keep hold of.

I have a little trick to help. I consider it an intro to meditation technique. First you picture a box of some type, a safe, lockbox, trash can, whatever. then picture your thoughts being put into the box leaving a clear head. Doing this will cause you to get a warm fuzzy feeling. When you get that feeling you can see almost anything. Try that for those who can visualize and those who cant, see if it helps.


Evan

I can visualize very good. It may have something to do with the fact that once in a while i hallucinate. i can littrealy be on the roof top and the beach rite now as clear as day. Im also a natural lucid dreamer,. mby those have something to do wiht it.

for me, it is REALLY hard to do the same visualisation twice... I tend to 'skip' parts because i've 'already done' it.... Its annoying because i'll have to think of new things while WILDING each time..

I dont know how you can "feel" your foot hitting the roof, that way better than me. Seeing this is really easy if you got a good book or something. I can picture most things but I have a hard time "seeing" it which is what will really help you in a WILD or something. If you can get like HI and see stuff you want, then WILDs are a lot easier.

I know a good way to tell how good you are. Try to picture someones face you know, just sitting there staring at you. If you can do it and it really looks like the person, your pretty good, if you can do it with like full color then your great.

An interesting range of abilities, thankyou for sharing.

young 'uns close those ears again... :D

I tried visualising slicing my dick off with a blunt knife, and it not working very well
If that doesn't produce emotion and interest deep in my head I dunno what would :roll:

Didn't work, but probably cos I was running a fever and have been having problems with LD's for some time now.

yesterday night i tried to manipulate my HI. Its quite easy. Manipulating the motion is easier then the shape, and colour is nearly impossible...

I cannot visualize myself very well at all..o.o.......But I can see a charactor that I portray as myself in most anything I draw.....Baku teh Kitteh person! xD...Don't ask how I though of tat person...*coughs* http://img57.photobucket.com/albums/v173/r...55/P4230006.jpg

http://img57.photobucket.com/albums/v173/r...55/P4230001.jpg...And I can visualize Me as her going into a Tv show, book, anything I've recently seen/read, especialy if I haven't read/seen the ending to it.......I can't see it like I'm doing it and feel the stuff but I can see it almost like a show on TV tht I am watching....o.o.....It's fun..^.^..But I can really only do this when I am lying in my bed, facing the wall that my bed is up aginst...o.o...Maybe why I can't visulize myself is becaus eI would never do things like In the visualizing That my charactor Baku does..oo;....I want to try and summon a person that looks like her in a LD...That would be fun! It wuold be odd though if that is what form my subcontious took in a Ld if I tried to summon it.

So..Have any tips for us people who can't visulize things well?

I do. study the world around you. when you are doing things in your normal day. jsut take a but of time to memorize the texture the sound and fell of eveyr thing abround you. look how lihgt reacts wiht it. watch how it moves, or watch how it stays still. Your L.D.s will be more vivd too you you are great at visulization.

Well, this is true.. visualization is an acquired skill. Everyone can do it with practice.

I have trouble gettin my visual goin sometimes in LD's and I have very little to almost none hypogognic imagary.. to top it off I don't always go into sleep paralysis.. so i may WILD and find myself in another room..

I visualize very well awake, but at night sound, touch, and taste are my strong senses, if i WILD, i must really concentrate on opening my "lucid eyes". However i can do everything else fine.

I am pondering on my long-term memory which is amazing (i remember things from 10 years ago to the tiniest detail.), I believe there was a time when i was a blind LDer, when i was about 4-5.. then i had LD vision problems until about 6-7.. finally I mastered all aspects of LDing, and was quite good at time compression. I was a heavy LDer until about 12..

Anyways, I noticed I suffer from insomnia and sleep attacks (i fall asleep during class alot). I can't be narcolepsy, cause I don't hallucinate due to sleep attacks.

I kinda drifted off-topic, but the point is, I had to develop my ability to visualize in LD's, when i was very little it was hard for me to remember how things look.. I find this interesting, because my memory is visual, if i think of talking.. i think of it many times as a chat conversation watching the text go by. Why I don't like to have visual dreams is beyond me (and it really hurts dream recall, 95% of my visual dreams are LD's, the rest i just can't visualize).

I even had trouble this morning remembering how the numbers went on a telephone, in a high-level LD... so i said screw it, and just visualized them as having names on them)

Oh well.. i'm driftin again. So i close it now... :?

I am going to cook up a visualization tutorial, I just need to get off my duff.

I think that it helps immensely with lucid dreaming along with finding your dream abilities also helps your imagination grow.

I will try and work on that this week ;)

natural artists tend to be better at visualization for some reason, i wonder why... :roll:

for the tutorial, have people imagine plain colors, being hard to do. then have them draw simple 3D things, cube-->trapazoid-->dodectahedron,(sp) lol, j/k, anyone who can draw a 20 sided 3 dimensional object is a very worthy person in my book.

right now i am listening to music in my head, due to the fact that i am too lazy to get out of this chair and turn some on, and being the fact that it is later at night, and i am shutting down.... but that also counts as visualization, right? i am typing this, listening to music, (an older song) and visualizing the rooftop cenario......sortof, its harder to do that than i thought...... anyway

I find that visualization comes fairly easily, but it doesn't seem very effective unless I'm immersed in something that holds my focus. For example, I'm reading a really good book and it seems like I'm no longer looking at the text, but that my brain is automatically transforming those words into images and I focus on those. It gets kind of annoying, though, when I realize I'm reading and my focus goes back on the text. Normally I can get back to it, but that's how it usually works for me.

Anyone else do that? Like when you finish a book and you get a clenching feeling in your gut and you think, "Oh my friggin word! That was awesome!"

-Amethyst Star

(I'm also a writer [fantasy] and I find that the more I write the more detailed I can get. That helps with visualization for me.)

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Even while I am typing, I can imagine this 'rooftop' scene[/b]

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:D

i dont know why that seems funny.


op, If you are saying you can actually see yourself like in reality running across the roof. actually seeing it, and actually feeling it, rather than merely thinking it. For me that's hard to believe. I would spend all my time making up scenes and sitting in a corner if I were you. That could be alot more fun than my life.

Alric makes a good point about imagining faces... I used to find that hard but now i can do it with most of my family/friends. I also just realised that imagining (imagining = visualizing) a colour is really hard... Im gonna work on that. I find it easier to imagine a green brick wall, rather than just green EVERYWHERE.

When I try visualizing this rooftop scene, I find it hard to keep the sounds of crunching tiles, plus the feeling of cold air on me plus seeing everything else in my backyard. I guess I still have more practice to do!

However, come to think of it, I am proficient at visualizing the female form when pleasuring myself.... :wink:

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Originally posted by LewisM
However, come to think of it, I am proficient at visualizing the female form when pleasuring myself.... :wink:

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A little more info than we needed, but thanks for the insight :D

i know what you mean about the book thing, one time, i was reading the harry potter books...... the fifth one i think (2.5 days RECORD!, beat that) anyway, i was reading it, then i fell into a trance or something, i just started dream reading, i wasnt really reading as much as sitting in front of a book and imagining it.... i then drifted off to sleep and had a hard time getting back on track because my mind had made up a whole different direction for the book, i was all like, what the--- i must have been dreaming or something


harry potter and everything related to dragonlance (see avatar) read them, better books you may never find

i can visualize very well.. i even practice .. yes you may think im strange after this :). but during the day to practice I will look at somthing .. say a car or a person.. and in my minds eye I will copy that image, and turn it into a wireframe 3d object, then spin it around and all that.. now with me,,. the more i concentrate the more detail i lose.. so i can snag a truck image i my mind, and then turn it into 3d wireframe, and all is great but if i start thinking of what paint i used, and tire tread count .. it all falls apart. :) but im yet to be a successfull lucid dreamer..

i jsut started my journal, and attempting nightly to become lucid.

Just to confuse the issue I am not yet able to visualise when awake but when lucid CAN...I very consciously watch a screen and have thousands of random images appear - colour or black and white, maybe 10 a second, and also have dreams where I'm watching the fine detail of the dream fabric appear as I look around 360 degrees in glorious high energy technicolour. I can feel and taste things in dreams too, though keep forgetting to try out smell!

So I have to contradict the notion that being able to visualise is key to having vivid lucid dreams. :?

I probably have stronger waking imagination in auditory and kinesthetic senses but it's great when dreaming to FINALLY be able to do the things all those guided meditation tapes suggest. I attended a psychic development group for a year during which I got one image - of a little boy with a saucepan on his head :roll: - so visualisation is so rare for me it's one of my dream signs.
Am hoping it'll eventually spill over into waking life though! And for the other non-visuals, add it to the list of fun things to do when lucid!

I've read* that all children can visualize like this. Remember sledding and feel the cold and the wind. But I also read that many people lose this as they grow up. It's just not talked about in the western world so many people lose the awesome power of imagination. Even dreaming is an exciting thing for a baby, but it's hardly talked about.

I can visualize pretty well, but not as well , Im sure, as is possible.

*I read this in Dianetics. And before you start thinking "Oh no. Not Scientology." Dianetics is not Scientology. It just inspired it. I think it\'s a very good book, though I don\'t see the basis for having a religion around it.

on topic of HI and stuff, yesterday I was on my airbed in a tent on a camping and felt the beginning of a WILD coming on, so I went trough with it and I ended up somewhere in a pre-rem dream something? It really confused me... had the usual WILD things, the pressure on my stomache that I could ignore, then I thought I was in the dream, shouted for clear lucidity, but all I saw was HI I think.... It was like beeing in a 80's intro for a TV show you know with the funky psychedelic colours. I could still hear everything outside, which was what brought me back as well... also when you apply pressure to your eyeballs after a couple of secs you'll see stuff that looks alot like HI right, when I do that after a while it brown 'cloud' stuff will cover up all the colours and eventually i'll see some kind of brown checkerboard.... well in my 'dream' the brown cloudy stuff also was covering alot of the colours.... really confusing.

WHat's HI?

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Originally posted by gameover
WHat's HI?

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Hypnogagic imagery. not sure if thats how you spell it though. It's those images you see when you close your eyes usually when you go to sleep or meditate.

Makes sense.
Are you really in Brazil?

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Are you really in Brazil?[/b]

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no :cry: . I was born there and then my family(and a lot of relatives) moved to the U.S here in massachusetts. I wish that they had picked a place that had a warmer climate instead of this place though. I want to go back and try to learn the language(I can understand most of it, but I can't speak it)

So you're brazilian eh? you're the first one i've met here that is one. :P

I was born in california but moved to Sao Paulo when I was 3 weeks old, and lived there for 5 years, then moved the US. I have half of my family living there, and have visited since I left. I'm lucky enough to have duel citizenship.

Is Sao Paulo the one with the huge christ statue? I hear a lot of positive stuff about that place. I was born in brazilia and that place is so boooooring! the next time I go, I plan to go somewhere better near the beaches. Good luck getting back there. :happygolucky:

Sao Paulo is the 3rd(or 4rth?) largest city in the world(by polulation). I don't know what christ statue your talking of, but its a very christian area. I really enjoy it because of my family, but it's not the most exciting part of Brazil. I hear Bahia, is amazing. If you like tropical white sand beaches. Talking to other Brazillians they've said to me "don't spend more than a few days in Sao Paulo" Well it's the only part of Brazil that I've seen!

although im sure that trying to relate to the places you have lived is fun* you are getting off topic









*fun, yea, w/e that means, i have been sitting in my compy chair for most of the summer

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Originally posted by nightowl
Is Sao Paulo the one with the huge christ statue? I hear a lot of positive stuff about that place. I was born in brazilia and that place is so boooooring! the next time I go, I plan to go somewhere better near the beaches. Good luck getting back there. :happygolucky:

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No. Jesus lives in Rio de Janiero. Unless your christian like me, in which case he lives everywhere. :D Sorry just made me think of a quote from the Simpsons, won't embellish though, die-hard fans'll know the one I mean.