I’ve been delving into some things people would consider strange for a while now: lucid dreaming, meditation, paranormal phenomena, psychological health, and such.
But one of the things I’ve really wanted to work on is my imagination and visualization, and I’m curious what that’s like for other people. I remember being a kid and being able to vividly imagine things right before my eyes, like Lego people moving around, and such.
Now, to really visualize, I have to close my eyes, and when I do get some images, they’re faint. They’re not even ghosts of images, but barely ideas. I try to visualize color, say, red, and all I can ‘see’ is an idea of red.
I’d like to know what it’s like to visualize for you all, especially those of you with eidetic memory. Can you see things in vivid detail? Can you, by imagining, superimpose imagine images over the real world (somewhat like HI, but consciously).
Are there any exercises for strengthening the imagination? I really don’t want to lose the ability to imagine. In my opinion, imagination is one of the things that separates us from–and I mean this in the nicest way possible–those animals that are inferior. Imagination is one of the factors that elevates us above them.
Here’s an excercise that I find really good for the imagination. Try to find a place, preferably outdoors and peaceful, and sit there and close your eyes. Now listen to the sounds around you and with those sounds imagine the “scene” and where they’re coming from.
If you can manage to imagine the whole scene fluently then you’re pretty good at it.
Generally, I find imagining things to be fairly easy. Aparentley, this is a case of gradual “Use it or lose it”. If you use it, you won’t lose it. I often find myself out of it and have to pull back to reality, coming up with an idea (complete with vizualzation) that is incredibly strange and new from a story. If you use it often, you will actually strengthen it.
well for me it’s hard to really visualize something if i am paying attention to something else but when i am just spacing out i can picture things really easy. It helps to have seen it somewhere recently for me (so it’s a bit harder to visualize things i have never actually seen). When i think of ideas of movies or comics or something i can usually visualize some short segments of almost video, but i could never visualize more then just a few seconds. Sometimes if i really like it i keep replaying it over and over in my head, it’s actually rather amusing.
On the topic of HI, a lot of it can be just random images but sometimes i get to the point in HI where i am actually in a dream, but a really cloudy one. In fact sometimes i try to move my phisical body or feel myself being moved. Unfortunatly this wakes me up because i don’t get SP before HI (at least not yet)