Thread: A Visualization Experience

Thank you both for your replies, this lets me go ahead and share this:

Spoiler for Dream-like but fully awake experience:

(...) As I was listening to second half of the OST, I had thoughts come and go of "darkness". Not vivid but dream-like imagery of being pulled down by my "dream" arm into pits - swarms of spiders and insects would appear and I wondered why it was that I could never have visualised a scene like this without feeling fear or horror in the past. Though the imagery wasn't strong, I still felt some disgust at some of the insects, particularly big ones.

This repeated itself in different ways a few times mixed with other passing thoughts I can't remember, related to the imagery. I remember thinking that this probably wasn't what I was "looking for" and thinking that it was interesting that a dream-like setting had formed.

Then as the soundtrack got into the last quarter the thoughts went sort of into the actual in-game area that the track would play in, though the imagery was still relatively weak vs an actual dream, I could sort of feel a dream-body and started remembering the black lizard from another of my DJ entries.
I started wanting to spot him but instead I realised that I was that lizard this time, seeing from first-person, but wearing a labcoat (which is one of my artificial dream-signs) and though I couldn't visualise clearly, I tried to do hand/finger reality checks; counting wasn't possible due to the low duration of physical memory and lack of "vision" - but passing my clawed fingers through my other hand's palm worked.

Though I was fully aware of the music being outside this and the fact that I was sitting on a chair, I felt it was important to try and do a RC to see if my mind would agree with what I was wanting to do. The place the "dream" body was in, was indeed dream-like, despite being awake.

As the music progressed I remember running through the halls of Athena (the in-game area) as if it were in the actual game, getting "deeper" into the area, "looking" down at my "dream" legs, noticing that they were scaly and black and that the feet were dinosaur-like, with 3 front claws and 1 rear claw or something like that; the in-game enemies were appearing and I attacked them with the claws I had and my large reptilian mouth, eating some of the smaller enemies and making particular note of all the blood that was showering from the enemies, just like it would in the game. I wondered, was this the darkness I was looking for? I concluded it wasn't. I tried to taste the blood but the sense wasn't strong enough since I could still feel my actual mouth too. I tried using the channeling effect from Warframe with my attacks but while this did disintegrate the enemies into energy, more seemed to appear from the dispersed energy.

As the music got to the last track I had on the list, which is the music for the final room in Athena, I realised I was standing where the boss would be. There was the player character down below in the chamber; he was autonomous and attacked the boss control room tower and shot towards me too, not penetrating the glass with the bullets. For some reason I taunted him by licking the glass, noticing the tongue to not be reptilian-like but being long, with somewhat better visuals than before. Then I remember breaking the glass and crawling down the wall as a lizard would and going for the player character and killing him; the hordes of enemies that were attacking him turned to me instead and I remember fighting them and soon after the music ended and the imagery ended, as if I'd" woken" up, despite having been "awake" the whole time.

This is from an entry in my DJ (be sure to read the comments) from a while back now and I thought I remembered ZAD commenting on it.

Even though it was almost two full years ago now, I still remember that to me this experience felt like what you two are describing here and it was certainly very interesting, but because it feels a bit specific in what I require to recreate the experience, I often can't find the time to dedicate myself to doing it or when I've had the time, I've unfortunately had interruptions and such like. I'm likely to try again at some point soon anyway because a few things have changed for me recently, and so it may feel easier (or not) now.