10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
These topics are always some of the hardest for me to fully comprehend. There’s also always going to be at least 1% of me that suspects you’re all lying or just don’t realize that you do have the same abilities as everyone else, but that’s likely just my brain trying to cope with what I just truly can’t understand. It’s not even first nature, it’s instinctual rooted in me that I hear this voice in my head and see these images and sounds and all sorts of stuff. However I think the closest I can get to relating is when someone recently told me their thoughts and dreams are vividly colored… vividly colored? No sir, my thoughts and dreams are barely colored, sort of more like it’s all in sepia color and dull. Almost like old black and white TV, but a bit of color. So now I know I’m missing something I’ve never had. This became a ramble, I just woke up, sorry!
Man, I couldve written that, I understand you so much
I wonder why your dreams are not vividly colored?
I used to try for lucid dreaming. Had some successful attempts. One thing that always woke me up from them was doing something too far outside my physical experiences. I could never fly like superman. But I could kind of float like I was in water sometimes. I tried to breathe underwater during these dreams a few times. It always woke me up. Until I got scuba certified. Now that I had had experience breathing underwater in real life, all the sudden that was fair game for the lucid dreams.
So my guess is your perception and processing of the world is somehow dull. I wonder if like those glasses that help some color blind people experience color would help shift that, or maybe time in a hyper saturated VR experience.
Also, one theory I have had is that it has a little to do with what I watched as a kid. I read somewhere that before color TV, many people dreamed in black and white. While I didn’t grow up in that time period, I DID watch a ton of shows from that time period with my grandma as a kid, stuff like I Love Lucy, The Munsters, etc. The way those shows looked is kind of how my dreams look and I think it’s why. The fact I also mixed in cartoons here and there is probably why I have any color to my dreams at all.
I didn’t want to dive too much into dreams because it’s a whole separate bee hive, but since you brought it up: I’m not in control of my dreams. At least not the ones when I’m sleeping. When I’m sleeping my dreams are like a movie reel that I watch, 99% of the time in first person, but I’ve had a couple where I watch myself as well. My day dreaming and imagining is completely in my control, but when I’m asleep I’ve never had any amount of control, or even realization that I am in fact dreaming. It’s just watching a movie without any play/pause/rewind/fast forward.