Visualize This
Visualization is a powerful technique for centering ourselves, focusing, and relaxing. But like with anything else, understanding the method is key to improving it. So here’s a rundown of why visualization is so effective and a few tips toward improving your practice.
Why it Works
Think about what happens when you sleep. Four of your five senses stay “on” all night, and only one of them – sight – gets turned off. Think about that. Think about how powerful sight must be if it’s the only experience that has to be eliminated to allow you to relax into sleep. Consider how your other senses can even help you: a gentle waterfall can lull and relax you, and a soft blanket will give you that snuggly feeling we all want when when we climb into bed. But if your eyes are open, there’s almost no way to get a restful slumber.
Vision is engaging. Movement especially grabs our attention, but even a still scene can provide intense repeated stimulation. The colors, patterns, tones and textures in a field of view can seriously activate your brain. It can keep your eyes flitting around, giving your mind the experience of being somewhere like no other sense can. This is why video games and movies are so fun and popular. This is why we’re so passionate about them – they feel like reality. Even silent films had a grasp over the imagination that no other media of the time had.
When you close your eyes and imagine a scene, you’re able to give your brain the same kind of stimulus as actual 
sight. How, why and what this means is a complex and controversial topic. For all you visualizers out there ,though, it means that we can powerfully affect our states of mind just by picturing things. So how to make it work?
1. Create As Much Detail As Possible
To start with some common applications of this idea, we can use visualization to alter our moods. By picturing ourselves at the end of a successful speech or presentation, we an improve our confidence about it. By imagining someone smiling at us, we become happier. By visualizing a project completed, we prime our minds to think about it, actually making the task easier.
Picturing yourself in a calming situation is a powerful way to relax your mind and soothe your spirit. Every level of detail that you add to the scene causes your brain to become more involved in it, making it more and more real to you. A fantastic guided meditation I once experienced involved picturing yourself in a calm, natural place. This was hard enough for me at the time. But when the instructor asked me to imagine the texture of the ground, the types of trees, the birds, the animals, and the scenery all at once, I found myself forgetting about the physical place I was in and very much believing that I was in the forest!
2. Bring A Friend Into the Picture
As the instructor asked me to imagine a visit from the person I loved most in the world. Doing this, I became completely immersed in the scene. Thanks to the power of mirror neurons, brain cells that have the same reaction whether you’re actually doing something or merely watching someone else do it, the visualized appearance of another person adds an engagement in your subconscious that has an indelible impact on your mood. (These cells, and the complexity they add to human interactions, are amazing enough to warrant their own post. They’ll get it.) Imagining another person, replete with actions and emotions, is an excellent way to trick your brain and enhance your visualization. Recalling a memory of a person that fits with your visualization’s purpose is a great way to integrate this technique.
3. Describe Your Dreams
Dreaming is the most natural and convincing form of visualization. Some people dream so powerfully that they confuse their dreams with reality, thinking they’ve gotten gas or fed the cat – only to later realize that the tank, or the dish, is empty. You may not dream at this level of intensity, but you can learn from your body’s natural visualization. When you wake up in the morning, recall a dream from the night. Close your eyes; relive it. Describe it out loud. Include the way you felt. These steps train your mind to picture imaginary events crisply and accurately, and then help you match images more precisely words and emotions. Enough practice will enable you to more easily create highly detailed visualizations of your own, as well as providing you with a catalog of scenes and emotions to draw from.
(photo credits:Pink Sherbet Photography, MysticMoon14)
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Very interesting! Thanks. Glad to see you don’t confuse visualisation with imagining using the other senses, as many people do. (For instance, we are told to ‘visualise’ ourselves, say, performing a golf swing. But the only way we can see ourselves making the swing is to watch ourselves from the outside, which is not the best way to learn how it feels to do it right.)
By the way, you suggest describing your dream out loud. I find that using words tends to destroy the mode of mind in which the dream took place. Might it not be better to relive the dream in imagination to consolidate the memory, then describe it later when fully awake? I get this suggestion from one of Robert Langs’s books on Communicative Therapy. He isn’t well known but has interesting ideas.
i think it definitely depends on the person – for me, if i don’t describe things aloud, i have trouble remembering them, but for others your suggestion is probably dead on.