The following assortment of exercises is designed to improve the vividness and the controllability of your images.
The Real Things
Visualize each of the following items. If the images don’t appear as bright as you want, don’t try to force them into being. Instead, focus on the idea of seeing an image. Know that whatever you are trying to visualize has a shape, a texture, a colour, and a size. Focus first on the shape and then fill in the details. Take time to allow the image to become steady and sharp.
a familiar face a childhood friend
a running dog your bedroom
a sunset a flying eagle
a babbling brook a drop of dew
cirrocumulus clouds a massive oak tree
a typewriter keyboard a snow-capped peak
a toothbrush your favourite pair of shoes
The Not-so-real Things
What is the difference between images of things you have seen and images of things you haven’t seen? Picture in your mind the following imaginary items.
a unicorn a chocolate river
a demigod with six arms a rabbit
a talking giraffe a thirty-foot ant
a pair of angels a four-dimensional sphere
World War III a five-leaf clover
Quarter and Drawing
Keeping your eyes still, took to the rim of your vision. Use your periphed sight to see into the full hemisphere of your vision. Close your eyes and try to reconstruct the image. Mentally divide the view into four quarters. Choose a quadrant and analyze everything in that quadrant, then draw that quadrant. Repeat for each quadrant.
Five Mental Pictures
Visualize five things that are blue. (blueberries, sky, book cover,………..)
Do the same for other colours such as red, yellow, green, and purple.
Visualize five things that begin with the letter A. (artichoke, aardvark,……)
Do the same for each letter of the alphabet.
Visualize five things smaller than your finger. (pen, pea, blood cell,……)
Visualize five things that are larger than a bus. (blue whale, train, …)
Visualize five things that are found under the ground. (roots, worms,…….)
Visualize five things that make you happy (surfing, ice cream,……..)
After Image
If you close your eyes after looking at an object, you will see an afterimage that lingers for a few moments. Try to incorporate this afterimage into your visualization. For example, look at a pen, close your eyes, and see the afterimage. When the image fades, open your eyes, look at the pen, close your eyes and see the after image. Repeat this a few times at a comfortable pace until you can clearly picture the afterimage, even if for only a second. Then try consciously to create the afterimage of the pen at will.
Peripheral Mental Vision
Visualize a pen in front of you. Then picture it slowly making a circle around you, so that it is to your left, behind you, to your right, and then back in front of you. As the pen travels, imagine that you are using your peripheral vision to see it.
Picturing People
Visualize all the people you have spoken with today. What did they look like? What colour were their hair and eyes? What were, their heights and ages? What clothes were they wearing? Can you picture their mannerisms and habits? Visualize the people you saw yesterday; last weekend; on a recent holiday; on your last birthday.
Picture a Butterfly
Picture a butterfly, perfect in every detail, with gold-piped wings, long furry antennae, and delicate markings, but imagine it being ugly instead of beautiful.
Mathematical Entities
A great deal of mathematics is performed with imagery. Visualize each of the following dimensional shapes. Don’t try just to form the image: also see the inner structure and relationships between the flat shapes. Mentally manipulate the figures, viewing them from all sides, including the inside. Try to get a sense of the tridimensionality of the solids.
Sphere cube prism
tetrahedron pyramid dodecahedron
octahedron icosahedron stellated octahedra
Feelings, Nodding More Than Feelings
Visualize a positive emotion. Mentally picture the feeling of astonishment, without seeing a specific object or memory. Try visualizing a wish, without wishing for anything in particular. How vividly can you. Realize the following emotions: hope, joy, fulfillment, love, anger, apathy.
Mental Presence
Form an image of the presence of your mother, without actually seeing your mother. Similarly, summon a mental image of being in the presence of a mountain, without visualizing the look of the mountain.
The Giant Body
Mentally picture an enormous human body. Imagine flying around this body, seeing it from various points of view and from various distances. Imagine that the body is so large that you can enter the nostrils, mouth, and other openings and explore the inside of the body. Make the body so large that you can fly across landscapes of cells, and even view the components of individual cells.
Colour Crazy
Visualize the colour blue. You may want to begin by visualizing a specific object, like a blue car. Then make the car so large that it fills your entire mental field of vision. Bathe in the colour. How bright can you make it? Try picturing other colours: purple, yellow, red, orange and green. Try imagining colour blends; red to blue with intermediate shades in between. Picture red above you, blue to the left, and green to the right.
TV Repairman
Choose a specific object, like a blueberry cheescake and try to form a clear mental image of it. Imagine that you can adjust your mental image the way you can adjust a television picture by turning various dials.
Images of Ideas
Picture the idea of Beauty. Do you see a specific image of something beautiful, or can you have an abstract image of Beauty without seeing a particular visual image? Do you associate sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations with your idea of Beauty? How large or small is the idea? Here are some more abstract concepts to contemplate:
Change order energy peace
harmony communication reality illusion
