INTRO

Note from author (Sensei):

This tutorial reminds me of this thread from Dream Views by StaySharp, except this is about visualization. I will have a TL;DR (Too Long; Didnt Read) at the end for those who dont like reading a lot of info, but you wont get the full effect of the thread that way.

Dictionary:

Visualization: The representation of an object, situation or a set of information as a chart or other image and the formation of a mental image of something.

Dream: A series of thoughts, images and sensations occurring in a persons mind during sleep.

Sleep: A condition of your body and mind which typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes are closed, the postural muscles relax and the consciousness partically suspended.

So, for me, looking at this, dreaming and lucid dreaming are a form of visualization, the big difference is the nervous system being shut off. Even though the two are incredibly similar and I think can really benefit the other, there are very few hardcore visualization experts here, but no visualization guides (Nothing as comprehensive or helpful as I am wanting!). I will be quoting a few things from people around the forums and different ideas as to why I think that visualization is helpful to Lucid Dreaming and just dreaming in general.

Anyone that WILDs a lot can tell you that dreams are not cut and dry like you think, there isnt a magical barrier that separates dreams and waking. Most people that DILD a lot can even tell you that they have heard/seen things after a dream that were in waking. So the dream and waking are separated by a spectrum that can only be defined by the amount of visualization you have, I believe. This is often seen by visualization abilities increasing closer to sleep (on WBTBs for instance, will go into this more later, so hold your freaking horses), Hypnagogic Hallucinations, NREM dreams, as well as the max form of visualization being dreams.

VISUALIZATION

This is a spectrum as well, because there are 5 traditional forms of it: Sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatosensation, but I will be using the word tactile, technically somatosensation is closer to the idea we are working for here, but tactile is easier to write and close enough!) I personally recommend not putting a number on how well you can visualize certain things too often, since you might place something at an 8/10 and the next month put something as 6/10 that felt the exact same due to your experience being better. I still recommend you putting these periodically, but write a sentence (or say a phrase) about how it is, instead of putting a vague number on it. Compare it to previous times, waking time, and dream time. On all 5 senses.

MY FAKE BODY

There are a lot of things that can increase your visualization senses. Things like music, daydreaming, cooking, or sports can increase your ability to do one or more of these, since you are often thinking about them. Most people that spend time on one sense more than another often have this as the first sense that comes up when trying to sleep. Hearing music while trying to fall asleep is common among musicians or people that like to listen to music a lot. This being said, I think that we have two bodies, our physical body and our mind body.

Visual/Tactile

Our physical body doesn’t need explaining. I am not trying to get metaphysical here and say that both bodies are the same or anything like that. I am saying that the physical body is just going to be the most basic idea of the physical body for this. The mind body is not just the body we have in dreams! It is also what our body is like in our mind aside from our physical sensations that are sent to our mind. For instance: I want you to toss a coin in the air and then catch it. Did you imagine catching it? If you caught it, then you actually put a mental representation of the coin and your hand (usually when catching I am only thinking about where my hand is, not the rest of my body, that moves on its own) and then you fast forwarded using the physical things you know to figure out where the ball would be. Your mind body caught it first. So right now, I assume that this is the same mind body that we have in dreams.

Muschle memory ( no mind body )

This is different than muscle memory, because muscle memory is when you have used your actual body and(or) mind body enough times with a single thing that it actually doesnt need to have the mind body do it anymore, the physical does it without thinking.

An example of muscle memory:

Stand up, walk around like normal. Did you think about how your body was moving? Probably not much unless you did something new or something that you havent done a million times. If you kipped up instead of standing normally, you probably had to think about some parts of your body, if you stumbled on anything, your body creates a quick mental map of the area around you and you usually catch yourself.

There are many things that your mind leaves to muscle memory and to visualization. When driving for instance, all of your movements have become automated if you have been driving for a while, and you usually have a 3D idea in your mind of where your car is in relation to the other cars. You will see a car in your rear view coming quickly and then stop looking at it, knowing approximately when it is going to pass you, or sometimes, if a car was behind you or in your blind spot and you know it would be there and it turns without you looking at it, it can actually be confusing because you think where did that car go? and feel like it just disappeared off the face of the earth, even though it could have turned ages ago, in your 3D model of the world around you, it was still there and that was broken. Visual and tactile would be like when you hurt yourself, but dont notice the pain until you see the injury. As well as our ability to feel others pain, like when you watch a crotch shot video and wince in pain with every slam.

This is your visual and tactile, that often slides into each other, but some that are 100% tactile are like thinking of the feel of a worm in your hands, or the sun on your skin, or someone biting you. You can usually easily pull these up, but only for a second, it isnt like it hurts as bad as waking, but you easily understand the pain for a second and then it fades again when thinking about it.

Auditory

Sound is probably the 3rd highest ranked sense, people would feel less involved in a dream if they didnt have sound, and this is actually an interesting thing since sound is the last sense to enter the dream state when originally falling asleep (and the first to wake up), this is why we are sensitive to sounds when sleeping, and sounds may even bleed into our dreams, other things can go into your dreams as well, but I have had a lucid dream before where the whole dream, the only thing I could hear was the podcast in my ears and not the world around me. So while you usually see and touch things in dreams, sound is the next sense that people notice, leaving taste and smell behind.

So, auditory mind body, sounds kind of weird, but actually, this is done a lot and like the others can be improved (seriously though, calm down, I will talk about improving them after I go over what all of them are, I wish you would stop hassling me). The most common mind body auditory stimulation you probably know is having a song stuck in your head. Oh man! It is bad! But seriously, you can hear the song, or at least just this 10 seconds of the song, over and over. So you may think I am bad at visualization, but all I have to do is say the lyrics to a song and you hear it in your head.

Want to try it?

Click Here

Sorry, when the 80s starts I forget to turn them off.

And it doesnt just stop with lyrics, think about these things without hearing the music

But this actually doesnt end here. Think of your moms voice. You probably heard it for one second and then it disappeared! Right? Hard to keep in your head, anyways, back to music. We do this a lot with music, especially when singing, playing, and especially when composing music. Try singing your favorite song, cant you just hear the music? Dont you pause at all the perfect places? Even if there is a 30 second riff, if I am singing my favorite song, I stop and listen to that, which is weird, since it isnt there, I am just imagining it.

Smell/Taste

So this is similar to the last one, think of things that you can smell or taste and what they are like. Heck, imagine what random things around you smell or taste like you will probably come up with something. Your mind can either make an accurate idea of what your curtains taste like, or maybe they remember from the last time you put your curtains in your mouth (just me? Fine, be that way). Yet again, it happens automatically, but when you try to get it to stay, it can be really hard to keep it there. I have some things to say about this.

So taking this into account, I think I have found out what Visualization is and how to use it. Hopefully I have convinced you that we all visualize all of our sensations all the time. We have a graphic 3D representation of the world around us in our minds, and that is an automatic function that we develop as humans. So we are, basically, taking this function and controlling it. This may seem reckless or dangerous if we break the function that it is there for, but isnt this the same exact thing we do with dreaming? Okay? good.

So anyways, people break this function all the time and learn to bend it into ways that suit their fancy with things like sports, composing music, making dinner, drawing, or really almost any special skill you get. It all has to do with visualizing. I am again not talking in a metaphysical sense where you cant succeed unless you visualize yourself doing this, but in the way that people honestly use the function with things like visualizing a drawing, visualizing the music, visualizing yourself during sports. Sports is actually a really good mixture of muscle memory and visualizing, since the fastest movements are muscle memory, but if something happens you arent expecting (which happens all the time in sports) your visualization reaction time is going to be a huge factor.

What does this have to do with dreams?

EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!

What do you think your dreams are made of? Not this body, or even things that this body does, but what your mind body is doing.

So, since I am explaining everything about visualization/incubation there, I wont explain it here. I am going to explain next how to bend this visualization. Another major key thing that needs explained here is that not every thought is visualization, just the ones that have to do with the senses or the extra senses (like imagining that you have telekinesis, some people use visual to move it, others have a tactile sensation of moving it into the air with energy). The other part of the mind is like ideas and words and things, some people put words into sight or sound before sending them out. I usually make a quick list of the things I could respond with, as well as a line of conversation that I would take it down with each answer and decide between the 20 options or so that I create before responding. So it is an almost visual conversation, but putting them into visuals would be too much to deal with, it just all pops up almost instantly from practice. So almost visualization, but not.

Okay, so we have talked about the ways that visualization is used in waking, but this thread is about how to increase your control over visualizations.

MasterMinds Post

When it comes to visualization its not the physical eyes that you are going to see with, its the minds eye. If I now say the word Batman you think of that with images because that is the language that your brain is using, images and association. So in the same way that you use the minds eye to see the image with eyes open, you can also see it with closed eyes. Its all about shifting what you focus on. Its difficult to describe exactly how this works because in short, we dont know.
I think you can get the feeling of what I am trying to describe.
So you should not think about what you do with your eyes, it doesnt really matter, the importance lies in the focus of your awareness! A proof for that (that you can try yourself) is that I can move my eyes around in random movements and and circles but still hold a visualization image in my mind, no matter if the eyes are opened or closed.
We can all do this simple visualization by holding a mental image on our mind for a millisecond, but when it comes to actually keep that focus most of us struggle. And the reason for that is that we are unfocused. We are raised with shifting our focus all the time, from facebook notifications to text messages etc. If you want to be able to maintain focus longer, you simply need to practise it.
A way to demonstrate that you already possess the ability to visualize, but the problem is maintaining focus, is to tell you to think about what you have done today, or to think of a memory. You are not only going to use words to describe that in your mind, you are going to use images! And by that time you are visualizing. But.. if you cant hold the images in your mind its because you jump to another thought or image and that is why the image you tried to focus on falls apart.
You can either practise your focus directly with visualization by keeping your focus for as long as possible on an image, or you can practise meditation. I have a guide on how to do that in my signature.
When you can easily keep a still image or a simple object in your minds eye both while having your eyes opened and closed, then >you can start using other senses and move your focus in this internally created world.
But remember to both practise your visualization skills but also your ability to focus, because if you cant focus, your >visualization arent going to be stable enough to play around with anyway. And not your dreams either for that matter.
I hope this helps and if you have more questions, ask away.
Peace!

I really like this idea, that we try to visualize, but it is fleeting because we cant keep it in mind because it takes focus. Imagine the word Imagine in your head, it seems really crisp at first, but then it just fades and when you try to look at it, it will seem blurry, or like you arent seeing anything at all.

So how do we make our visuals last longer? Practice! Practice! But that being said, some things will take longer than others, and some things can boost it much much more than anything else.

In order to get better at this faster than anyone else, we will make some quick guidelines to increase our practice.

Video Game rules: energy and ability level

You only have a certain amount of energy, some things take tons of visualization energy, others take very little, while others take almost none at all. This is actually going to be pretty important. Things that are hard for you are going to take up tons of mental points and things that are easy will take up little, there is even a special group that seem to take extremely little to no effort. I will talk about these later! So anyways, it might be good for you to name the different abilities and approximate how hard it is for you.

Remember though, that doing the same easy thing over and over, like in a video game, will get exceedingly easy, to the point that it doesnt take anything but muscle memory, but this will also minimize the experience points that it gives you for leveling up. So some hard, lots of easy, and lots of medium. haha.

There is another little hack that works like this: If I have the options to visualize right before bed and I choose it every night, it already takes willpower energy just to start. If I already set it in my mind as something that happens the second I turn out the lights, then it will not take any willpower to start. So instead of choosing when you are going to visualize or practice things each and every day, just have a set thing that marks when you do it. This actually works for all sorts of things and is one of the reasons, I think, that naturals learn so much easier than us. Because it becomes something that they just do when the lights go out. At night, they get ready to lucid dream. There is zero pressure, there is zero will power extended. It is more like turning on a video game rather than programming one (these are both extremes, but you get the picture). This is another reason that people that leave DV after knowing how to LD, often get better faster if they don’t forget about LDing.

Timing

I am not saying not to practice visualization in the day, or really far away from sleep, but there are certain times that your visualization is just better than others. Things like a completely black room with either repeating noise or no noise is really good. If you could get your hands on a sensory deprivation tank, then I imagine that would be amazing, I have used them while visualizing, but that is for later as well.

Visualize during a WBTB
Visualize right after waking
Visualize during a dream
Visualize with eyes shut
Visualize one sense at a time to max one
Visualize with as many senses you can keep at once, even if they all arent strong

These are some things that will be almost like steroids for visualization, it makes it so much more vivid and more stable visuals.

Especially the night time visualization during WBTBs, I would put this down as something you want to try once a night if you can. Things that will usually be extremely hard for you will take little to no effort here. I personally recommend sitting up for this so you can practice without falling asleep. There will be times (like when VILDing) that you will want to fall asleep visualizing, but this is about getting better at the visualization part.

Daydreaming vs Visualization

Most daydreaming is visualization, but not all of it. It is pretty easy to tell the difference when you think about it.

~ HACK ~

Another way to get good at a normal way of visualization is to use creativity to hack an ability you already have to change it. There are plenty of ways to do this, but here is one. I am not going to list a million since I think that creativity is part of this!

LucidJordans Quote

Waking Life Visualization Technique (Could help with those who have trouble visualising)
Whilst I was walking down the pier with family last night my mum told me to close my eyes and see how far I could walk down the pier before I opened them again, she guided me so I didnt bump into anything. I ended up walking for 10 minutes but decided to keep the process going for fun to see if I could make it home. The rest of the journey was a 5 minute trip up a long sloped street and then a turn and a walk down my entire street. I made it all the way to my front door but as I got to my gate I realised that I could try and visualize what I should be seeing, as if my eyes were really open but it was just too dark to see anything. IT only occurred to me to do this here because I know my front garden and the inside of my house very well. By this point I had been moving with closed eyes for a good 15 minutes. I didnt begin to vividly see my house or anything, but as I felt my way past the front gate to the garden, and stepped in my house, I explored my house with my eyes closed and tried my best to visualise what Im extremely used to seeing on a regular basis. I was able to navigate with much more efficiency after I started doing this rather than just feeling my way around.
Then I thought this might be a good practice technique for lucid dreaming techniques. So what I am going to do is navigate my house each night for a little while with my eyes closed the whole time, and hopefully this experience will greatly enhance my ability to visualise when Im going to bed (something Im not too great at). It gives me the focus to really feel what Im touching and hearing too, since there is no visual input.
What are your thoughts on this, do you think it could help? Sorry if this is a tried and tested idea already.
Ill let you know how it goes for me!

Another thing I would recommend would be something like feely cup, or anything of that caliber. Maybe just put your hands behind your chair and touch things, imagining what they are or put a blindfold on and put something in your hands. These kind of things being touched for a long period of time can really up your stability of an object, as well as memorizing tactile sensations of an object. A really amazing thing.

See how it takes a normal function of creating the world around you and forces it without visuals? Things like this really hack the crap out of your mind and can show you how to visualize. This momentary ability to visualize beyond yourself is actually what jump starts your muscles for certain abilities. After this, you can really start working hard on things.

This way of breaking things up is actually really important for making visuals more dreamlike and getting a really good WILD going. being able to stabilize some things and let other things form.

Two main Stabilaziation groups

If you remember my control thread. Then you will remember that separating things into groups for your own purpose and then working on them individually in those groups can help. Then the next time, you separate it in a completely different way and do it again. Separate into each individual sense and count all effort as a positive for all things sight. Separate it only as keeping one thing stable, and count all effort as positive there as well. This mindset of getting better at a broad range of things inside of one group instead of just the one thing you are working on can really boost your later attempts. When beginning LDing, I knew I was good at dreaming and incubation, so I knew LDing would be easy, I grouped them together. With this new visualization time that I have been working hard on, I know that I have done lots of visualization that is in lots of ways unrelated to what I am doing now, but I lump them together and say I am good at visualization! LOL. This positive mindset and lumping together and separating and lumping is really good for keeping a positive mind.

Visual Induction of Lucid Dreams (VILD)