This is an anecdote of personal experience in the last 40 minutes rather than a how-to.
If you haven’t heard of Carl Jung’s Active imagination technique, it’s pretty much traditional meditation turned inside out. Instead of trying to empty the mind, you are ‘actively’ involved in its contents. You pull up or allow an image of a person or thing in your imagination and you speak to it. As one YouTube vid explains, empty your mind momentarily… then the first thing you ‘see’ that moves, follow it and talk to it. Active Imagination comprises so much more than that, but that’s it in a nutshell. I’m trying not to write an essay here.
I lay down for a nap. I played some recordings of Tibetan gongs and singing bowls to help me from falling asleep, which I’m good at doing during midday naps.
I had a moment of my most visual and remembered Hypnagogic Imagery. While talking to an imagined character I was looking at a spot of some sort. I reached out for it with a very vivid hand and the spot became a fly that reacted and flew up and landed on my hand.
The sheer vividness of the experience jarred me out of concentration simply because I’m not used to having vivid HI outside of the movement one usually sees after just a few seconds of having their eyes closed. This was almost photographic quality.
This should be an encouragement to everyone who thinks that they don’t have the gift of vivid HI. It brings to mind what’s written in LaBerge’s EWLD:
Ouspensky’s half-dream states developed out of a habit of observing the contents of his mind while falling asleep or in half-sleep after awakening from a dream. He notes that they were much easier to observe in the morning after awakening than before sleep at the beginning of the night and did not occur at all “without definite efforts.”
High-quality HI may be more of a matter of perseverance than natural talent.