Imagination

[Mnemosyne]

This is a really silly question, but I'm still curious: When you use your imagination, what is it like?

I've been told that one way to communicate with your guide/higher self is to imagine yourself sitting on a bench in a garden and invite your guide to sit with you. Until I tried this, I never gave much thought to imagination. What I found was that for me, imagining a garden was not easy to do.

When I focus on using my imagination I find that it's a staticy grey blur and I have a very hard time creating an image. Using the garden for example, I get frusterated because when I try to create my image I don't know if I should be looking down at myself sitting on the bench (in third person) or looking out through my own eyes as I'm sitting on the bench (first person). Either way I choose, I have a very difficult time creating the images because it's so staticky and grey, although sometimes I will get rushes of color that blow by.

I was just wondering what other people's experiences are when they attempt to use their imagination. Do you imagine in color? In first person? Third person?

[Radical]

I can imagine in colour, however the picture is not like seeing with my eyes. I can't really describe it.

[Erin Pavlina]

I imagine in first person and third person depending on what I'm doing or trying to accomplish. I've always been good at it so it surprises me when I run across people who have a hard time imagining or visualizing.

It's like memory. When you access a memory how do you see it? Do you just know it? Like if I asked you about a movie you'd seen, as you describe it are you seeing it in your mind's eye or are you just using language to describe what you're seeing?

[LillyoftheValley]

NLP and body language studies are showing us that there are visual, auditory and kinesthetic types of people. It is basically the way you receive information from the world.
They also refer to this as your favorite sense, the way you are inspired.
I was wondering, maybe we're suppose to receive information from ourselves in the same way, by intesifying our favorite sense?

There are even tests to determin this. I was suprised to find myself to be in between visual and and kinesthetic (I was certain I'm a visual type - I'm a painter!)
I've read somewhere that most people think of themselves as visual types, yet results are that 55% of us is visual, 30% kinesthetic, and 15% auditory.

[elainevdw]

Originally Posted by Mnemosyne

This is a really silly question, but I'm still curious: When you use your imagination, what is it like?

When I read a book, it's like a fast, blurry movie in my mind. I see a layout of the scene (if it's well described), color, how tall or short characters are. I get a concrete "feel" of the area. Stuffy? Cozy? Scary? Neutral? Sometimes I can differentiate voices, but generally, most of the voices sound similar, and most of the characters have similar facial features in my imagination (unless it's otherwise specifically described) -- like I have an Imaginary Person template that I superimpose character details over. Oh, and even though I can hear the voices, I don't really hear them in real time. Would slow the reading process down.

I'm working on visualization, myself. I try to visualize things that I already am familiar with whenever possible. Like in the "Go to your room" visualization, you start out in an elevator. I spent two years schlepping documents to law firms in San Francisco, so my "elevator" in my visualization is a mix of my favorite parts of the elevators I was in most often. So I know what the light level is, what the buttons feel like, what the carpet smells like. It helps ease me into the rest of the visualization.

I do have a tunnel vision problem. I don't have very much peripheral imaginary vision, unless I take the time to specifically craft the enviroment in my mind. Sometimes I think I can "see" a vague representation of most of these environments whether my imaginary self is looking at them or not.

I used to always be third person, but now I force myself to think first person. I start out by looking at my imgaginary feet and deciding what I'm wearing, which helps ground me into the first person. (And is fun, because I can wear cute shoes and have flat abs in my imagination!) And sometimes I'll imagine a mirror, so I can emphasize the fact that I'm first person, in an imaginery body, looking out. I also focus on tactile sensations, like pushing the buttons in the elevator.

I get ahead of myself a lot and rush through places without totally visualizing them, so I try and force myself to feel the visualization in real time. Each step down a corridor, instead of "poof," suddenly being at the end of the hallway. That sort of thing.

I think it's helped my visualization skills a little.

Does that answer what you were asking? It's a tough question!

[kthdsn]

I find it very difficult to imagine visually. I don't remember visually either. I sort of just feel emotions. If I try to imagine myself in a garden, I don't see the garden at all, but I feel the freedom of being outside, I feel the enjoyment.

I tried really hard to do the elevator thing, and all I could see was the buttons. I felt the anticipation of getting to the destination level, and I felt kind of closed in, I don't like elevators. Before I got to the right level my thoughts drifted off to something more exciting.

If I do manage to see something in my mind, whether it's a memory or something I'm imagining, then I get the tunnel vision thing. I can only see the particular part I'm concentrating on and nothing else.

I am similar to this in life too, I concentrate on how I feel and I don't notice what things look like very often. I don't notice if my husband shaved or not, I don't have any idea what he was wearing last time I looked at him, and he's sitting just beside me, I looked at him a second ago. I guess I'm more of a feeling person than a seeing one. I would be very interested in the test mentioned above, is it online, can you post a link?

It's not that I don't know how I want the things to look, I just can't see them. I know what my kids look like, but I can't picture their faces unless they're standing in front of me. It's hard to explain. When I try to picture them, instead of seeing their faces I just feel happy, the way I feel when I can actually see them.

[elainevdw]

Originally Posted by kthdsn

I find it very difficult to imagine visually. I don't remember visually either.

It's interesting how interlinked our visulization skills and memory are. Maybe one step to increasing your ability to visualize lies in making concrete qualities of your memory better.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall of one of my boyfriend's dreams. He has an extraordinary memory! I bet his dreams are very vivid, too.

[ScottS]

I find it extremely difficult to remember the sentence I just read in a book unless I *really* concentrate and take it slow but movies are extremely easy for me to remember. Audio stories fall somewhere inbetween (more towards the book side than the movie side).

For recalling movies there is no visualization at all, I just retell the story based on whatever summary of the movie my mind laid out. Even with a movie I've seen the most (Fight Club), the best I could do is quickly flash "non-solid" still pictures from the movie in my mind. If a police sketch artist asked me to describe Brad Pitt or Edward Norton, I would probably be beyond useless telling them if their sketch is right or wrong but not how it's wrong.

I'd be very interested in hearing if other people can do much better than this and if this ability is a learnable skill for an adult (and if so, how!). I'm thinking that there might be a relationship between people that say they don't dream (like me) and not being able to visualize compared to some lucid dreaming pro like Erin who has no trouble visualizing.

[kthdsn]

Scott that sounds quite like how I remember things, although I remember books better than movies.

I do dream often though, not lucid dreams but vivid ones. I dream in the first person perspective in full colour, not at all like my imagination or my memory.

This is a really interesting subject and one I would love to learn more about.

[ScottS]

Oh yeah. One of the examples I've heard recently to convince people like me that we visualize even though we don't actually remember it is the question "what color is your front door?" (I think it was from a website describing image streaming).

For me, it's like my mind searches a fact database and makes my mouth say the word "brown" without any intermediary steps as opposed to visualizing the color brown or visualizing the door. If I try to visualize the door, I get the color right and the fact that it has a 3 diamond window design on top and a fancy pants doorknob but I missed the knocker, rivets, and the peephole in that visualization. I also got the number of wood planks wrong (5 instead of 4) and the shading and texture of the wood and glass (my visualization is a generic solid color).

[Paul C]

I've always had a good imagination, considering that creative pursuits such as art have played a common role in my life.

Being a very visual person, I picture whole scenes within books, figure out what characters may look like, their voices even come through somehow and seen within full colour, of course. Movies have major impact on me if their cinematic shots are done well and the general feel of the movie is vivid and interesting.

And after reading and applying much on visualization within this very forum I did have an incredible increase in clarity of dreams. Colour and shape appeared far more vivid. And as noted before, elsewhere, my memory (most noticeable is visual memory) increased greatly within waking life as a result or recording my dreams whenever I could.

An exercise that I find very helpful is picturing a well known object within your mind's eye and examine it as if you would in reality. Try to make it as real as possible, dismantle it even. Or apply this exercise to a location which is well known to you. And if you really want to be creative, why not visualize a plant growing from seed to tree, then cut a branch from it and carve something! Many possibilities.

[phire]

As others have mentioned, there are other ways of imagining besides visual imagery. Personally my imagination is more kinesthetic. Whenever I read novels the visual imagery I get from the book is not as strong as the feelings that I get from the book.

When I remember back on a book that I've read, I get a feeling of it based on the culmanation of the different things I felt while reading the book. I can then take that feeling and extrapolate backwards to remember individual parts of the book. I can also interpret these feeling into visual imagery if I need to explain the story, or a location in the story to someone, but its not how I directly remember it.

There are also people that imagine in a more audible way. Perhaps there are even people that imagine primarily based on smell or even taste!

However you imagine, I believe its important to strengthen your other senses. I've begun doing exercises recently to try and strengthen my imagination in other areas. To strengthen visual and auditory imagination I will try to reproduce a scene from a movie or conversation I've had in the past. Usually I do these two senses together but it may be best to practice them independantly. I have a harder time imagining smells and tases but I'm working on that. I've begun paying more attention to my sense of smell and taste in the physical in hopes that it will strengthen those senses in my imagination. So far I've noticed some improvement.

My advice is that if you have trouble visually imagining yourself in a garden meeting your guide, then try feeling yourself in the garden and feeling your guide come to you. You may even be more comfortable hearing the sounds of the garden and the footsteps of your guide walking to you. Or you may smell the garden and the aroma of your guide as she approaches.

The point I'm trying to make is that meeting your guide in your imagination is for the most part an imaginary experience. If it is hard to do it one way then imagine it another way... after all, it is the intent that matters.

[andrew]

I found this an odd question because I don't really "use my imagination", it's just kind of who I am. Thinking and using my imagination are like the samething. Whilst what I see isn't as vivid as in real life, it's still pretty much clear.

When recalling a memory, it's the same as imagining it, in a mental visual sense. I'm pretty sure you use different side of your brain for each, because when you're remembering you look right, and making things up the left usually. (a way to catch a liar)

I have to say though, touch, smell, and taste are pretty hard. I can pretend I'm imagining them, if that makes sense.

[PresNevins]

From time to time I've had shockingly realistic visual perceptions, complete with light and shadows and perspective and highlights, that all happen by themselves. Clear as day, and all I have to do is look. But these come on their own maybe once or twice a year, while the rest of the time I'm left with a significantly more shadowy, murky form of visualization. So I like to think I understand both camps, the "easy visualizers" and the "can't visualize very well'ers." But the important thing is that I've found it really doesn't matter all that much, once I got it through my head that I could use other nonphysical senses -- and was indeed already using them fairly automatically when I didn't "try to visualize" and think about it too much.

Basically I think of it like a UHF TV station that sometimes comes in well but often has a lot of static. The quality of the programming being broadcast is unaffected by how well I'm receiving it, so I just trust the content of my visualizations regardless of the quality of the visuals on any given day. Kind of like a video on YouTube that's pretty low resolution and sometimes streams pretty poorly, but the information is just as valuable as if it were a super-clean HD image. (Okay, the words "YouTube" and "valuable" don't really fit together in the same sentence, but just as an illustration... )

One method I find useful is to deliberately use my internal sense of touch as a backup or alternate to visualization. For example if I wanted to visualize (visually) a specific coffee mug and was only getting a vague sense of it, I'd switch to my sense of touch and feel what the cup felt like all over. Just basically turning the object in my mind in all directions and groping it with abandon. I'd feel some grooves in the side and remember that the mug had a design etched into it, and that would give me a visual flash of the grooves being of a darker tone than the green surface. So this visual of the color green was almost automatically triggered by the contrast with the grooves I'd felt -- the nonphysical tactile perception had triggered a related nonphysical visual perception. By using one nonphysical sense to balance and reinforce another one back and forth like this, I'd get a more complete multi-sensual "image" of whatever it is.

For me, this tactile sense also includes things like location. Something's in front of me, or to the left, a little below, or "way over there."

I find that my nonphysical tactile sense is way more robust than my visual sense. It's more easy to switch on and start using. It really comes in handy (ahem) by allowing me to just trust that my nonphysical senses are functioning, without really paying attention to which one I happen to be using at the moment. And once I forget the details of which senses I'm using and just concentrate on "perceiving" something, then I find that I can go for some time without any difficulty, and only later it occurs to me to wonder "Was all that stuff I was doing visual, or tactile, or what?" It seems like I unconsciously switch to some kind of separate broad-spectrum "general sense" that makes the distinction between different nonphysical versions of human sensory organs all kind of irrelevant. In other words, when I relax, I just sense.

Does that help?

Pres

[Anagogy]

Everybody's suggestions have been awesome, and I would just like to input my $0.02.

When I meditate, I specifically do it to improve my ability to visualize. My goal is to be able to create images with as much vividness as reality, and to do it easily. I think this ability is paramount to developing many psychic abilities. The best technique I've found, and it's already been suggested above, is to pick some object that is familiar to you (oftentimes, I choose a red apple), study it and then proceed to engage your memory of looking at the object.

The first few times you do this you'll probably notice your mind doesn't want to concentrate. Despite that, persevere, and each time you will notice your memory/visualization is becoming clearer with each attempt. Eventually you will be able to focus and keep your interest on the object of visualization. Ever remember your dreams? Notice how the images easily spring up in such a state. When you fall asleep, you relax and become interested in your thoughts. This leads to images springing up that can be mistaken for reality. I can't emphasize enough how important interest is to the visualization process.

Your ability to become absorbed into your visuals is what will lead you to visualizing vividly in my opinion. When you have developed this type of concentration, you reach a point where some of the "fine details" of your visualization that you aren't even consciously trying to visualize, will pop up, making it all the more real. This is a very cool experience. It's like your subconscious is putting the "finishing touches" on the canvas of your mind.

I wish you much luck in this pursuit.

[Liara Covert]

Thinking back, I've repeatedly initiated or imagined a specific place in Japan. On some level, it continues to be an exercise in visualisation. This has gone on for years. To date, I've visited Tokyo airport, yet my life has recently evolved in a direction where I may travel there later this year.

Anyway, I recall other dreams or images imagined at night and during the day, but what makes these Japanese images stand out is that there was a time when I just began fading into them naturally when I desired to relax and induce sleep. I still feel like I am retracing my steps through a story, either one from my past, my vivid imagination, or some premonition of the future. Its also possible timelines are linked. Each time I fade into this dream, I seem to discover an ability to add details, to take a simple place and add realism. I am astonished to connect deeper with the laws of attraction and intention.

As the images materialize, I slowly pass under the distinctly asian stone arch into a japanese garden. I inhale aromas of lush, green plants and touch wooded trees. I use all my senses to take it in, even visualize a pagoda and cemetery at a distance across a body of water. I walk a distance over white pebbles and flat stones, pass boulders stacked naturally as if to defy gravity. I ascend unusual stone stairs to a traditional japanese wooden house with sliding doors which I open smoothly. I remove my traditional sandals, step inside and absorb surroundings of the house which I realize is raised up off the ground. Each time I experience this dream, I move gracefully through the house and notice more details than before. At times, I eat a bowl of rice and drink tea at a japanese table before eventually making my way out the back sliding door. I descend into another kind of garden, noticing herons and make my way to a wharf. At times, I would turn to a boat and if I was still focused, I would get in and continue on a journey. I struggle to concentrate before fading away from this experience to unveil a completely different dream. If I focus too hard, I lose control of the evolving experience (dream). Has anyone else had experience like you paint details onto a canvas like you knew they were already there and then your life seems to evolve into it as if you literally walk into that canvas?

For those of you who don't know,a pagoda is the general English term for a tiered tower with multiple eaves common in China, Japan, Korea, Nepal and other parts of Asia. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most commonly Buddhist, and were often located in or near temples.