For those that haven’t read Zach Tratar’s post on training like Tesla, go read it, it’s the premise for this experiment. I also have a post here about my personal thoughts on the experiment.

I started this experiment 4/14, and so far I’ve done 3 active imagination sessions (two of 15 minutes and one of 20 minutes), and I’ve had 1 really memorable dream. The dream was incredible and really in line with the goal of the experiment, so if you don’t have the time or patience to read the imagination sessons, skip to the end and read the dream.

Method for Active Imagination

I’ve been wearing a blindfold, earplugs, and whatever other clothing I happen to have on. I sit in my closet and close the sliding door. The combination of the closet, blindfold, and closed eyes yields complete darkness. The blindfold and closet are necessary because I can leave my eyes loosely closed without any light leaking through. The earplugs don’t kill all the sound, but they’re good enough that I can imagine I’m in a completely different place. I may or may not change my soundproofing method. I have a watch with a countdown timer that I use to time the sessions. 15 minutes seems a little too short, it takes around 15 minutes for me to actually develop a steady flow of thought.

Session 1

For the first session I imagined myself in a place from my past: my childhood home. I walked down the street toward where the bus used to pick me up for school. I ended up backtracking a lot. Asking myself ‘Wait, what do I see?’. I saw sun shining through the trees, my brother chasing after me, these unique berries that my friends and I used to throw at each other, a wooden fence that I crashed on when I was first learning to ride a bike. I was able to visualize it all clearly. However, when I tried to push past what I remembered vividly, things started to get blurry. I couldn’t really imagine anything new.

I removed myself from that scene and tried to force myself to think about different things. I saw a bowl of dust and some sort of air blowing machine. A glass dish. The most interesting thing I saw was probably this metal and glass rectangular fuel cell from the video game Halo. I tried to recreate the fuel cell in my mind.

Towards the end of the session, I started to see green and yellow neon wisps that started large and shrunk until they disappeared. They looked sort of like smoke. I think this just might be a physiological thing with my eyes though, nothing truly psychological. They looked cool though!

Session 2

I tried to keep this session a bit more laissez-faire. At the time one of my friends was leaving my apartment, I heard the door close and imagined what things would look like from their perspective. Walking out of the door, down the hallway, down the stairs, outside. What was it like? Sunny, breezy, cool. I tried to look at specific things. The bumps on the cement of the sidewalk. The kind of traction my shoes would be getting in this weather. I was focusing on one thing at a time. It’s very difficult to change the idea of cars lining the street into actual images of the cars. I tried to focus on some of the cars that are usually parked there.

Again I pulled myself out of the scene and tried to think about objects…devices. I’m currently writing a science-fiction novel that involves an interstellar ark and decided to try and visualize the ship (which I’ve done before unsatisfactorily). First I imagined the nose, but it was unlike I’d imagined it before, it was a much more natural representation. After the session I drew out the nose I’d seen, then extrapolated to the rest of the ship. The results were awesome. I also have a sketch of the ship that I’d drawn before.

I also imagined a couple other things, but they weren’t interesting to me.

Session 3

This session was more ideas than visuals. I was also tired when I went into the session and found myself nodding off a few times. However, there were two main differences with this session that I didn’t experience with the other two: I got an auditory episode of an odd rhythmic clacking noise, like tongue clicking; and at one point my hands (which were folded across my lap) twitched and it felt like sand was falling through them. These last two aren’t necessarily desirable, they were more results of sleepiness than anything, but I still think they were cool. The only real visual I got was a very abstract image of shapes stacking on each other.

Dream 1

This is the crowning achievement of the week.

The room was reminiscent of a ‘speed dating’ room. I was there with a large group of people. There were sessions where we would put on a mask-like device and close our eyes for a certain period of time. The mask is the focus here. It wasn’t clear what the mask’s purpose was. It was very detailed. It was very much like a gas mask, with two circular filters, an exhaust vent, and head strap…but it also had four extra tubes: two for air intake and outtake, and another two for mercury intake and outtake. There were breaks where we would take off the masks in between each session. After coming back from a break, my usual seat was taken, so I moved to a different one. This seat had the device disassembled with all the parts sitting on the table in front of me. I started to put the device back together and even took some tools out of my bag to do so. It was frustrating and I before I could finish, one of the attendants led me to another station towards the back of the building that had the device already assembled.

The reason this dream fits so perfectly with this experiment is that firstly, I encountered a device that I had never encountered before; secondly, I encountered the individual parts of the device; thirdly, I was faced with the challenge of reassembling the device. Novelty, details, and understanding. Major facets of discovery. It’s still questionable if the dream was a result of the week’s training or not.

At the top left is the device completely assembled, next to it is one of the filters encased in a hard, clear plastic. The tubes were reinforced vinyl. The adapters were labelled with plastic letters that cut through the middle of the tube. The exhaust vent was plastic with a flexible rubber lining that only let air out. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, the mercury tubes reminded of mercury’s use in switches. At the very bottom of the above photo is a sketch of what the room looked like.

The above photo is a sketch of the room layout at the top, and a perspective sketch of the back room with columns.

Tips

Practice drawing things as you see them. While you’re eating lunch or taking a break, just look at something and sketch it out. The ability to see something and then reproduce it is a key part to actually dissecting the things you imagine, or the things you see in your dreams. Just like teaching a subject helps you solidify your own knowledge. Be more aware in general. Being aware of your surroundings will allow your brain to make more random connections and surprise you more often. Be fully awake during imagination sessions. The point of the imagination session is to lucidly and actively experience. If you’re nodding off it’s no good. Save that for dreaming.

I’ll try to do more sessions this week. Onward!

-AW