Daydreaming visualization vs. closed eye visualization

This has been bugging me forever and I know it has for other people too. I noticed that visualizing with my eyes open is much much easier than to do it with my eyes closed. I can just space off and my eyes no longer percieve what I am really looking at and just focus on my visual thoughts. I can create any sort of vivid daydream I want, but when I attempt to use visualization with my eyes shut, there isn’t as much progress. Is there a certain reason for this? I’d really like to be able to visualize better to aid in certain WILD techniques, but the only way it seems to be possible for me is if I fall asleep with my eyes open :eek: .

I wonder if any research has been done on this. Also, if anyone has any way I can utilize my daydreaming visualization into WILD then let me know.

This is unusual as seeing usually distracts people from their ‘internal senses’ or mind’s eye. However possibly your mind uses your eyes as something to compare its vivid perspective attempts etc with.

I think its because you have something to look at, so its easier to let your mind drift. When you close your eyes, you have nothing to observe, and you’ll most likely start internalizing your thoughts to the point where you can’t focus to create a visual.

My suggestion is practice Meditative states, do small meditations to increase your ability to do closed-eyed visualizations. This isn’t uncommon, and I in some ways know how you feel. For me, I’ll be daydreaming and such all day, but the minute I hit the bed, I start thinking about random topics and can’t “focus” on a visualization. It takes practice, but it can be overcome. It’s all about being able to clear your mind, and let the “3rd eye” do all the work.

Go here, it’s helped me gain more control over my thoughts:

learningmeditation.com/room.htm

I know exactly what you mean. The last months I have found that I can sort of blend what I see with my eyes and what I think about. It feels really freaky. When I was watching a movie on my computer and them I paused it for some reason. Then I imagined that I reached out my hand and touched the person in the movie and it felt more real than a daydream. I do it by focusing on both what I see and what I think about.

You could try using VILD to keep your mind awake when you try to WILD.

"I think its because you have something to look at, so its easier to let your mind drift. When you close your eyes, you have nothing to observe, and you’ll most likely start internalizing your thoughts to the point where you can’t focus to create a visual. "

I think just opposite:)Im actually very keen to try this thing with open eyes.If i close mine i see just dark darkness and my mind starts to wonder about milions of things.Im never able to see even a simplest object.Its just dark.And ive been trying to achieve anything on this field for over two yrs now.Never even been close to what ppl call trance or alpha state or else…im just there with my eyes closed and after some time…30 mins to 1 hr i just either fall asleep or get up bored to death:)

ill see what can be done if i keep them open.Btw…do u avoid blinking or do anything else?Or you just lie down and gaze?

I find it fairly easy to see things in my head without having to close my eyes. Whenever someone has a conversation with me I can picture a lot of the detail. Eyes closed or open, it works the same for me.

I’ve had fun with this, trying to get my Mum to imagine the same crazy image I’ve just made up e.g. the cat dressed in a ski suit on skis :lol: It’s interesting how you can have some control over another persons mind.

How can u guys do that with your eyes open??
I can only do that when my eyes are shut and im in a dark place, when my eyes are open i cant visualize anything

different people visualize things in different ways. i have the same problem where it’s hard for me to focus/visualize on something with my eyes closed. i think the reason it’s easy for me to visualize with my eyes open is because when you are, your eyes are constantly focusing on one thing. and since your thoughts are stablized, it allows your mind to focus on something else more vividly. now while your eyes are closed, your eyes are constantly trying to stabilize itself by focusing on something while your mind is still wandering about. because there are so many things to think of, it’s hard to focus on one thing. lol… i dont think im getting my point across. i hope that made at least some sense.

edit: i just thought of an example. ok, when you go to the bathroom for a potty break, you’re staring at lets say, a tile for like 10 minutes and its easy to visualize things.

haha oh yeah! i do that all the time…thanks man that last example did it

I’m neutral.
I’m fairly sure I space just as easily both ways.

something i find easy to visualize while i lay in bed…you know when youre driving or walking at night and the headlights of a car will shine on you briefly? I can always visualize that pretty well, you know that brief really-brightness of it, from there its the car as it passes by and then the rest of the surroundings come into focus/existence. Ive never actually pulled this into a WILD successfully but did induce a dream like that where i was driving but not lucid.

i just realized that i was doing it on the bathroom tile again, but as soon as i realized i was i could only keep focus on the tile and not my mind, so i guess it takes practise or something to zone into the imaginary mind world.

a big thing with WILD ive realized is keeping a sort of balance between your mind knowing it is/will be a dream and actually getting into the dream visualization stuff. If you focus too much on the visualization it will not be lucid (though you would have a successful dream creation or summoning) and if you focus too much on the mind knowing it is/will be a dream the imagery will be harder to ‘get into’ and thus turning it into a full blown dream will be harder. Maybe a trick around this is to sort of take a risk, like get into the imagery and plan to remember it is a dream, maybe integrate into the visualization a cue that will remind you.

…Which is rather a lot like VILD…

I think that in all probability, the problem you are facing is that the mind naturally induces an alpha
tendency when the eyes are closed and this in turn
makes us more relaxed and thus less focused. Many people have sufficient shadow issues such that once the beta minds control wanes, they end up wandering around in their thoughts. The trick of deeper and higher levels of lucid visualization is to
secure the aid of the subconscious mind- both to lucidly visualize and to maintain some amount of self discipline.

Other issues may be that the subliminal mind is not in a situation where it feels safe, (And safety is a whole lot more complicated than it might seem as an issue considering that the Mammalian Id is actually terrified of social impropriety.)

Closing ones eyes is itself a signal interpreted invariably by the Reptilian mind to begin slowing down the activity of the brain to Alpha levels. If
what you are after is increasing simply the capacity for waking visualization while still maintaining operational functionality in the “Real World” then
theres not much to worry about… At least you
are visualizing at all, which is better than most people.
:tryfly:

It really depends… Sometimes I can visualize very well, sometimes it does not work at all…

Even does it sometimes work better with closed eyes and sometime with eyes open. But when I just started to do it and it works, then I can change it, say: open my eyes / close my eyes (if they are shut / open) and the visualisation still takes places… sometimes it even gets better…

A little story about this: Once I visualized something, my girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend, unfortunately :sad: ) told me about/described to me: a multitude of small moths occupying the ceiling and circling and fluttering around below it. The visualisation worked very well, with eyes open, right at her place, where they had been, when they haunted her :smile:
A few weeks later I dreamt exaktly about this thing!!! It looked exactly like I imagined it… after all, it was a horrible dream :happy:

I wonder if you can use something like that to induce lucid dreams… So you set some visualisation over and over again and then sometime you’ll dream about it and will be able to recognize that image!!

I know what you mean and to answer the people who were saying about looking at tiles of the bathroom, I get that a lot, I sometimes just go just to see what my sub counsciousness is showing me. Though when I have my eyes are open I see things all the time, I see visualisations right in front of me, but I also see floaters and I see like whole animations of real life, subverted over the top of what is there. When I go to sleep I do find it hard to control my wandering thoughts and decide what to do, but generally I just rekindle some of the events that have happened that day. But sometimes when I have been awake and had a daydream but I liked what i saw I will repeat just the information, so as when I say this again there is an image attached to the reference point, such as I think of some weird plane in real life in a daydream and then when I fall asleep I remember what the plane looked like and experience it in a LD.

“So you set some visualisation over and over again and then sometime you’ll dream about it and will be able to recognize that image!!”

lol I dont know if you are being sarcastic or serious, but just incase you’re serious, this is the definition of the method known as VILD.

I can space like everyone and visualise things with my eyes open and they tend to look super vivid. When I try to space with my eyes closed and I’m not tired, I can’t do it all that well. It takes alot of concentration to do. So last night I was laying in bed thinking about this post and decided that the reason that it was hard to focus was because I was already focusing on shutting my eyes and keeping them closed. It’s not like I was focused on it really, it’s more like I was just holding them closed till I fell asleep. I decided that maybe if I wasn’t busy keeping them closed and I was just looking around that maybe it would be easier to visualise something. I turned over and layed on my belly with my face in my pillow so that my eyes were stopped from opening by the pillow. I then started to look around with my eyes being held shut by the pillow and low and behold about 5 minutes later I was able to visualise an entire room in a house quite easily.

So I’m guessing the that when ur eyes are open and your just looking around then its easier cause theres less to do… It’s easier to visualise things when ur tired cause your eyes wanna close anyways so you don’t have to hold them closed yourself.

I hope this makes some sense :confused: