Add Some Color To Your Visualizations

One thing I have struggled to improve has been my visualization ability.

Visualization skills can be of enormous assistance in our lucid dreaming endeavors, especially when we try Wake-Induced Lucid Dreams (WILD). When falling asleep each night, I generally use a "silent" image streaming technique to get my visualization faculties warmed up.

Image streaming proper is the verbal description of the images, scenes and colors that you see or imagine when you close your eyes. Although the actual technique involves speaking aloud as you watch the images and scenes in your mind, my girlfriend wouldn't appreciate it if I talked loudly about the random (and sometimes racy) visions that appear in my head as I go to sleep. So I use a "silent" method, in which I internally describe the images as they appear.

This does two things:

1. It stays true to the core of image streaming, the purpose of which is to link your internal image streams to verbal representations. This creates a connection that will come in handy as you begin to become conscious in the dream world. By associating images with verbal descriptions (or, "commands"), you are more easily able to call up scenes and images in a lucid dream using the power of words.

2. It keeps your conscious internal dialogue connected to your imagery and imagination, which increases the likelihood that you will find yourself "awake" while dreaming.

Now, one thing that has always bothered me about my initial visualization warm-ups at the beginning of the night is that the images tend to be faint and somewhat lackluster. One thing that I have found to increase the vibrant color and detail of my imagery is to begin my visualizations by picturing solid colors for a period of ten to fifteen seconds each.

Generally I picture a large square that extends out of my field of vision, and go through a series of colors as pictured below (beginning with solid white):











What I've found is that I will go through these colors about 5-10 times, then focus again on actual images for about 3-5 minutes. Then I go back through the cycle of colors.

This has helped tremendously in enhancing the color and vibrancy of my visualizations.