Thread: Powerful visualisations vs lucid dreaming

I've always considered visualization as kind of like a lucid daydream. I do it all the time--I visualize myself in a lucid dream during the day and think about what I want to do. I also do it as I'm falling asleep at night to remind myself that I'm dreaming.

It's a great way to get lucid because I am always thinking about dreaming. So I agree, they're complementary.

Do you mean visualization in the strictist sense? A form of focused daydreaming? Or do you mean actually lying down, closing your eyes and slipping into a partial state of dreaming?

By powerful visualisation, I mean intentional, purpose-driven, highly focused mental imagery with exquisit detail, addressing all the senses. Yes, a focused daydreaming, to put it simply.

I am of the opinion that visualisation is a powerful tool that can give a person experiences comparable to a LD, with the only difference being that there is zero randomness.

So a master of both VS and LD is a master of both worlds.

Sounds good. How long have you been doing that?

But, what if someone can't achieve that highest form of visualization?

I really want to, but it seems I can't get control of my wandering mind.


I can imagine myself onstage singing but I only see a mental picture in my head

Any recommended websites and/or books or exercises you know of to improve visualization skills?
I seem only able to visualize something for short amounta of time. It never stays stable or in good focus.
I suppose, like most things, it just takes time and practice ;p

I'll just answer people's questions in this one post:

1. I've been using intense VS for about a year. Before that, for 2 years, I was using general VS when the occasion required, such as when playing sport, before a public presentation, or when playing chess etc. Now I use intense VS for relaxation, healing, motivation, inspiration, fun etc.

2. I've never found any worthwhile information online on how to improve visualisation skills. So I decided to start with the basics, and work my way up from there. Only through persistent practice can you hope to improve your skills.

For a beginner(from my own experience), there are 2 distinct problems:

a) Can't hold a stable image. What you need to do is to start with a basic image, like a white square on a black background. The simple shape, straight lines and contrasting colours are easy to see with your mind's "eye". Try to hold the image in your mind for as long as you can, before it loses stability. Whenever you get the chance to close your eyes for 30-60 seconds, try to visualise it. A beginner shouldn't try for more than 5 minutes, because it is not easy at the beginning, and a prolonged attempt will leave you bored and fatigued. Once you can hold a stable image in your mind indefinitely, pick a more complex shape, like a black shape of an animal on a white background. Simple shapes took me about 2 months to master. Eventually, you will be skilled enough to progress to photos of faces, and then whole people, animals, scenery etc. Use pictures that give you pleasure, or give you a sense of fun, like a rainbow, or a pretty/handsome face.

b) Moving visuals lack detail. Moving visuals are much easier and more fun than stable images, but they are mostly just that, visual, with little to no awareness of the other sense. For example, if you were visualising yourself singing on stage, you may only be able to only see yourself singing silently, with no sound, with no audience, with only a single level of ligthing etc. Try to add details, a little at a time. Firstly, imagine the sound of your voice singing a song, perhaps reverberating around the stage. Then add lighting exactly as it would be if you were on a real stage. Then add an audience, see and hear their clapping after your performance. Then feel the heat of the lighting on your face, feel the floor through the bottom of your shoes. Smell the peculiar odour of the theatre, feel the joy/or terror in your body as you perform. Keep adding detail until you get the complete performance exactly as it would be if you were actually performing on stage.

You should try stable and moving imagery in a complementary fashion. Since stables are harder, devote more time to it, but when you're in the mood for some fun, not hard work, use moving. Each method will help you to progress in the other.

Anyway, that's enough from me on this subject. Use the mental powers available to you, have fun with it, and experience life to the MAX.

I will leave you with this quote, used by Stephen Laberge in Chapter 6 of "Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Awake & Aware in your dreams".

"The vast majority of people have enormous potentialities of thinking, far beyond anything, ordinarily suspected; but so seldom do the right circumstances by chance surround them to require their actualization that the vast majority die without realizing more than a fraction of their powers. Born millionaires, they live and die in poverty for the lack of favourable circumstances which would have compelled them to convert their credit into cash". A. R. Orage.

Hey Flashdance!

Thanks a lot for posting this. This is very interesting.
I always considered visualization as a skill that can be strongly developed with a bit of patience, but I never really took the time to do it so far.

If you dont mind, I have a couple more questions concerning the learning process:

I tried to do the exercise with the white square on black ground, and I must say that it is really hard for me to keep up a nice clean image even for a second. The image seems to blur and vanish all the time, the edges are not really hard like they should be (only if I concentrate on one edge at a time), the whole whiteness of the square seems to get overshadowed with shades of gray etc.

This really seems hard to do, and I wonder if there are any more tips you can give to keep a really nice clean image in mind that doesnt blur and change all the time? Also, it seems that I cant really hold the image in one fixed place, it's like floating around within my imagination. Do you have a special way of keeping it fixed, like do you imagine it in a special 'physical' place (for instance behind your head, directly in front of you or just on a random black background)?

You said it took you 2 months to master these simple shapes. How much practice did you have to do every day to get there?

Thanks for this very inspiring thread and I hope you can clear things up a little more

There is a WILD tutorial using visualization: VILD. It uses exactly this to lucidly enter a dream and worked awesomely for a friend of mine xD

Hi lemmefly.

I forgot to mention that you need to relax when trying to visualise. What you ought to be doing is to passively look at the square(or it's formation), like looking at a painting. It's like looking at hypnagogic imagery. If you try too hard, you will get a headache. When that happens, stop immediately, and try again later.

If your white square is greyish, or not uniformly white, that is to be expected at this stage. Your mind can play tricks - if you have a background that is predominantly one colour(ie. black), the mind will extend that colour into a white square ie. it tries to "fill" the square with the predominant colour, making the square greyish.

Here are some things to play with. In your mind's eye:

1. Look into a perfectly black room, which has a perfectly white, square lightbulb that has a dimmer switch. Slowly turn up the dimmer switch, and a white square will start to glow into existence, but only lights up itself, not it's surroundings, eventually becoming perfectly solid white square.

2. Look at a white square hanging on a perfectly black wall. You can even imagine hanging the white square onto the wall.

3. Look at a black sheet of paper, then visualise putting a white square piece of paper in the middle of the black sheet.

4. Look down at a square container that is sitting on a black table, imagine white paint starting to fill the container, and the paint then defining(constrained by) the walls of the square, to give a solid edge.

Keep the square small enough so that you can see all it's side at once. If you have to focus on an edge at a time, the square is too big. Once you can keep the image stable, you can play with different sizes. Shape deformation is to be expected in the beginning. Don't worry, in time, your shapes will remain solid. Practice makes perfect.

To keep your shapes stationary, imagine the square constrained by horizontal and verticals bars in the field of view. I've attached an image as an example. Try to use your imagination to solve all problems, since it's all in your head.

I really recommend playing around with Microsoft Paint, or any other graphics software to create shapes. Then look at the shapes on the monitor, and then close your eyes. Your mind will see the "afterglow" of the shapes, and that can form a basis for the formation and solidification of the shape.

I took slightly over 2 months to master simple shapes. Whenever I got the chance to close my eyes for 30-60 seconds, I used it to visualise shapes. I was doing it probably about 30-40 times a day. And I was doing it while lying in bed before falling asleep too. For me, it was fun, so my enthusiam and motivation was high, and I think that made a difference.

Good luck, and have fun.

I'm not convinced. Unlike with LD's, you're never completely submerged, you're always a passive observer, right?

Originally Posted by Naiya

I've always considered visualization as kind of like a lucid daydream. I do it all the time--I visualize myself in a lucid dream during the day and think about what I want to do. I also do it as I'm falling asleep at night to remind myself that I'm dreaming.

It's a great way to get lucid because I am always thinking about dreaming. So I agree, they're complementary.

me too, although I've never really had one that real. It could probably help you with your regular lucid dreaming also.

I have always wanted to be better at visualizing, I pretty much suck at it.

I will try to remember to practice when idling.

Thanks for the tips, flashdance.
I will absolutely give this a try for the next few weeks.
I will stick with the square on blackness at first, thanks for posting the pics

Today I just closed my eyes and tried to see that shape, but it's really hard: The (idea of a) square turns into a circle, the image is not at all centered compared to my physical field of vision, the aforementioned graying effect and so on.

You are right, the square I imagined was way too big in relation to the rest I think, I will try to keep it similar to the pics you posted.

The idea of using after-images is nice, I thought about that too. Thats an easy help that can be done before going to bed to get a first image into mind to work with.

30-40 times a day sounds alot actually, so I guess you cant always be laying down to relax and practice.
How long did it take you to get your first really good shape and keep it up for like 10 seconds without interruption? I guess that first step is really the hard part, after that you are just adding seconds until you can do it for such a long time that its more or less stable forever.

By the way: Can you also do this with opened eyes now? For instance, could you project a more complex shape on a blank sheet of paper and just "trace" the imagined shape with a pencil to help you with drawing?



@ Hot Chocolate: I think you shouldnt underestimate the power this can have if it is really strongly developed. First of all, this should make V-WILDing get reaaaally easy if you get used to it. But even beyond that, if you manage to get into a relatively strong state of trance, I assume that this can already be pretty close to an LD experience and I am pretty sure that you dont have to be a passive observer all the time, you can also immerse yourself into the scene, as flashdance described in his earlier posts. This skill should also prove very helpful in fields like sports, developing an outstanding memory and so on. Certainly cant do any harm

When I say you need to be relaxed to visualise stable images, I don't mean deep relaxation. I mean just your brain being passive, looking at the shapes, without forcing them into existence(guaranteed instead heachache). The only time you brain needs to be active is when you use moving visualisation.

30-40 times a day at 30-60 seconds each is not that hard to do. I do it while I am on the bus, at work, in the car, at home, at any time I can safely close my eyes for a short while. And if I am watching TV, I do it whenever the commercials comes on. The only time I do it laying down is in bed before falling asleep, and I only do it for 5 minutes maximum, because it makes the mind too active for sleeping.

I can't remember exactly when it took for me to be able to hold a stable image for 10 seconds, but it was over a month. Once I could hold the square stable, the other shapes were easy.

I can visualise anything and hold it stable on a blank sheet of paper. But I can't use a pencil to trace it because I can't focus on an image and the pencil at the same time. As soon as the pencil enters the FOV of the image, I can only focus on one or the other. If my eyes worked independently, I could keep one on the image, and one on the pencil. But if I could, that would lead to another problem:

If my hand and the pencil were to cover parts of the image, the image is destroyed, and needs to be re-visualised, and depending on the complexity of the image, that can take 5-20 seconds. Imagine a projector showing an image on a wall. When someone walks in front of the projector, the image is destroyed. But a projector is a machine that can continously project the image; I can't. I have to keep rendering the image again and again and that can be time consuming.

But along the same theme of projecting onto a piece of paper:

1. Maths. I can do it looking at blank piece of paper(or completely in my head). I can visualise numbers, and can do long division and multiplication in my mind as if I am doing it with pen and paper, in exactly the same time it would take with pen and paper. Imagine people's surprise when I get an answer with 3 or more decimals places with my eyes open.

2. Note/memo taking. I program for a hobby, and when I don't have any paper lying around(most often when I am driving), I use "mind" paper, and write the code in my head. I then run the code in my head and try to debug it too, so the code usually works by the time I get to type it into a real compiler on the computer.

And of course, I use powerful moving visualisation for the reasons in my first post. And I can do moving visualisations with my eye open, including overlaying projections onto real people/objects/scenery in real time.

Anyway, I will now conclude my contribution to this subject. When I started the thread, I just wanted to bring to people's awareness that visualisation is a skill that can be delevoped to achieve comparable experiences to LD. I didn't envisage that I would be actually "teaching" the techniques, or this level of involvement on my part, which I don't mind, but I don't want to be "chained" to this thread. I think I've written enough essays.

There is enough information in this thread for people to get started, so I wish lemmefly and anyone else who gives it a go every success.

See you all around DV!

This is quite simply amazing. I can't see why I did not think of this before, I've never realised that it would help to start of with a tiny object which is quite silly of me really haha.

Nice job explaining. I will be trying this from now on.

My only questions are these.. do you actually see them in the exact way you would hypnagogic imagery? When you overlap such visualisation with the real world are you seeing it all in your mind, or do they appear solid externally whilst you visualise. I understand these might be a little tricky to answer, its more out of curiosity than need-to-know as I'm sure it doesn't matter too much... its still a great idea.

On independance of eyes:
Another thing you might want to try to help is to change the dominant eye you hold whilst you visualise. I know it is possible to do, I can do it myself, I can't explain much. Take your hand a place it over an object, close one eye and see where it is. When you find your dominant eye, try to switch it to the other whilst both eyes are open. This can make your eyes more independant. Then I would suggest that you close one eye if you can comfortably, and visualise and watch at the same time, eventually progressing to both open at the same time.

Behold, the power of imagination!

Mine is overactive though. I live inside it way too much. I probably need to visit the real world every now and again, but my imaginary worlds are just so damn awesome.

i used visualiztion the other night when i was really tired. i imagined myself walking on this beach and the next thing i know things were happening in my visualization that i wasn't even imagining like a mini dream, but i wasnt deep enough in sleep cause i quickly woke up from it.

Haha, I always do this!
I fall half-asleep in the car and visualize myself in a war/fighting someone/having fun. Does it actually help induce lucid dreams, or is it just a complement?

Oh, and I also cannot draw things I visualize. I get some pretty amazing ideas, etc, but I just can't... Ugh... Any way around this?