Speaking of visualization, today’s kitsnaps photo is another one I’m especially proud of.
From
For those that don’t visualize, do you remember your dreams? And how do you daydream?
I do remember my dreams, and they’re typically visual. Once in a while I’ll be reading the story of the dream (and holy *gods* is it frustrating to then wake up and be unable to get the words that were on the dream-page onto a *real* page), and slightly more often but not regularly I’ll dream an ElfQuest story in black and white still panels.
I daydream in words. Everything’s words. Daydreams are stories I tell to myself in my head, with words. (Ted’s head nearly turned inside-out when I said that.) I seem to have the vague long-term sense that yes, daydreaming in words is probably unusual, not what most people do…but I don’t think I believe(d) that people really daydream in pictures any more than I can fundamentally believe that people see pictures in their heads when they read. :)
Also in the comments, from
Now *this* is interesting. I, as you might guess, have to work REALLY HARD to write a comic script page. I don’t really see what I’m trying to describe, but an artist can draw something very like what I imagined the page to look like (big graphic: it’s the first page of the script and 4 artists’ renditions of it). After seeing enough of Ardian’s pages, I started to have a clearer idea of what the individual pages might *really* look like as I was writing the script, until by the time I was writing the third script I could *almost* see them. I *know* what they look like,and I can *almost* see what they look like. This is quite the deal, for me. :) Anyway. It’s all very interesting!
So tell me about your daydreams! (Um. Not necessarily in intimate detail, you understand…:))
Daydreaming in words? I think my head nearly turned inside-out, too!
My daydreams are all visuals, 3D and full color, but no sounds or words, definitely. Sensations, sometimes — when I’m tense I sometimes find it helpful to visualize/daydream about lying in the snow on a dark, starry night, feeling the cold slowly numbing and calming me while I watch the stars (more and more of them coming out as time passes).
OTOH, I usual don’t remember my night dreams at all, except for once every few years when I wake up from a bad dream. And I used to dream full color/full sound night-dreams back in my RPG days when we’d had a particularly dramatic session. (‘Top Secret’ pretty consistently triggered that, for some reason.)
Day dreams… Humm I suppose my Day dreams would be words combined with movement. Nothing special.
Now the dreams i Have just before and after i sleep?
Well Have you ever read Tenth Dimension theories? ‘Cause a few years back when I first read about it I was in shock, ’cause those random black holes, that’s what I dream.
I daydream in words. Everything’s words. Daydreams are stories I tell to myself in my head, with words.
Ditto. I don’t visualize in pictures, which drives people crazy when I join their meditation sessions.
And I hear you on the comic pages – I’m not looking forward to the hair I’m going to tear out when I start doing the script for Broken Wings.
I love to find out that other people tell themselves stories rather than have “daydreams”. I have an entire cast of characters that I use in stories. I usually can’t fall asleep at night without a story. One of them actually became my first novel.
So, no, you aren’t the only one who daydreams in words.
I have very vivid daydreams, more like movies playing out in my head…or sometimes even real scenes, as I can almsot feel, smell, and taste in them as well.
For a long time, I think my daydreams were the only place I felt comfortable and in control, where I could see myself doing anything, and where fantasy reigned to the point of encroaching on my concept of reality. It’s why I liked MUSHing for so many years — I could visualize the text so well, and learn so much from playing around in my written daydreams. Now that my reality is much calmer and more appealing to me, I daydream and fantacize far less, because I get a big kick of reality. My daydreams are less fantasies than ideas in my head now — where I imagine myself in a few years, what I want to do with my job, if I’m ever going to manage to go on a date or have an SO again! :) They’re all very nice dreams, ones that seem within reach, which makes them all the more rich.
Incredibly frustrating is what it is.
Case in point: Dreamt last night about… didn’t wake up from it right… a place? God damn it, it was enormous, and it was contained within something bigger, like a city, but inside it was so big there was a vanishing point. And there were trails and lines and track and we split up and walked along them and… this is useless.
I think the internet and video games (and their UT) have made it even HARDER to limit my dreams to just visual concepts. It /feels/ visual but it clearly isn’t. The sense that I can talk to people on different channels broadcasting over different group-spaces isn’t visual, but there it was: the ability to talk on the Global, Line, Side, Group, Local levels. Also, I have save-games in dreams sometimes. And I can access data about the world much more fluidly than I can in real life. As I said, Rich Dream Format.
Really, I’m starting to think that what I think (and dream) in is… thoughts? Concepts? Which words make up a significant portion of, and images don’t. Anyhow, I noticed this as I was writing a big well-imagined scene recently: no matter how well-imagined I had it, coming up with the actual words I wanted to use was a matter of translation.
Sounds like you’re the anti-me, at least on this issue. I visualize like crazy and can’t get the words to say what I see. This, I suspect, is one of the many reasons you’re a Famous Author and I’m a Gave Up Long Ago. :)
tersa, I accidentally deleted your comment while killing spam. Sorry. O.O
Oh NOES! It is gone forever and ever! *wail*
Okay, not really. The important thing was that you saw that I did comment. :)
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And just to respond to your daydreams demand ;)–my daydreams are even more movie-like realistic and formed than the quasi-visualizations I get while reading.
And are capable of literally making me fall asleep, which I ascribe to the same underlying reason as why the proverbial “counting sheep” works that way (which I read once as being due to engaging both sides of your brain in a repetitive and monotonous task).
I don’t visualize. Even when I’m trying to recall people’s faces or locations or whathaveyou. And when I do, my visualization is so loosely tied to reality that I’m often unable to recognize someone or something. I once stared at a photograph muttering, “She looks familiar…” but unable to place the face, until someone cheerfully informed me, “It’s a picture of you.” I was shocked to see a photograph of my first boyfriend, insisting that couldn’t possibly be him, because my boyfriend was gorgeous, and the guy in the photo was …not… whereupon my friends were all like, “Now do you see why we kept giving you funny looks when you said how good looking he was?”
I’m very much a kinesthetic oriented person. I don’t hear or see, so much as I *do*. Daydreams are all about the touch, the action, the flow. I can remember vividly the dream in which I experienced weightlessness, because it was an actual experience, versus merely seeing myself floating. So there’s all the side-issues of the terror of losing your frame of reference, not being able to tell which way is “up” without the subtle cue of gravity, the helplessness of not being able to “push” against anything… as well as the exhilarating freedom of knowing there were no limits to hold you down, now. How would you get all that just from seeing it?
In one of my masters degree seminars (my degree was in philosophy), the teacher had the 8 or so students close their eyes, and imagine (this is key … he said “imagine”, not “visualize”) BLUE.
Most of the students said they either saw the color, like a paint chip, or something that was the color, like a pen or a lake. I stared at them all, with a look of “what drugs are you on?” on my face.
Finally, the teacher was like, “Did anyone else imagine something different?”
I raised my hand. I’d imagined blue as initially a formless void (which is a lovely soft sparkly gray space, by the way, not black) with a pinpoint of something in the distance, that rapidly surged forward (or sucked me into it) until it cascaded over and around me, filling me with blueness. The cool of waves. The dark velvet secrecy of the night sky and its shadows. The glowing brightness of magical force. Connecting, concealing, and the endless cyclical battle between the two. What it meant to be blue.
The rest of the class gave me the “What drugs are you on, and where can I get some?” look. :-)
Dreams: visual
Daydreams: visual
Reading: visual
Writing: visual
Remembering: visual
I judge how well someone writes, by how easy it is to see what they’re describing. What determines good writing by you?
Wow. That is an amazing picture!
Nice to see the different first drafts!
I have no problems visualizing things. It may be just that it’s a facility you haven’t used much, and as you say, you’re developing it. Here’s a silly question though, can you imagine feeling something? Like petting the alien not-quite-cat thing say?
That’s a great question, and sometime when I have moe brain I’ll try to give it the response it deserves. I can’t put the thoughts together right now.
Honestly, the last 3 years, because I’ve been more aware of the whole visualizing concept, I’ve tried to some degree to develop it, and I mostly find that when I get flashes of images–scenes, people, remembering what things look like, whatever–I *really* don’t like it. I’m trying to stop, at this point. It’s really horrible. *shudder* It’s just wrong, and it feels creepy. I don’t get anything that clear when I’m trying to do comic book pages, just a better sense of it, and I hope it doesn’t get any creepier than that.
No, I can’t imagine feeling things, either. Once in a while I’ll have a flash of that (or a flash of music in my head that actually sounds like a radio or something) and it’s startling as hell.
Thank you!
I could never grasp why counting sheep put people to sleep. I get distracted by other random thoughts. Maybe if you can visualize it’s easier to do it.
It reminds me, though, of a bit from one of the Feynman books, where he was talking about an experiment a bunch of them were running with who could keep the most steady count of minutes in their heads. He said they’d observed that the people who were best at it were the ones who could see, for example, a clock ticking off the seconds in their heads. That was another thing, like the Emily book, where I just went, “…buh?” I spent quite a lot of time trying to see if I could see a clock in my head, and I sure couldn’t. I didn’t really grok that there were people who really *could*.
Hmmm, curious. What’s the process you use when devising a comic script then? I mean, if you don’t see the pictures that you want on the page, how do you describe them? Or am I utterly misunderstanding what’s going on here?
I think really, *really* hard about what I want the page to look like. I don’t see it. I have an idea of it, and I’m good enough at writing to communicate the idea of it (as exemplified by the four basically identical, overlooking artists’ stylistic choices first page sketches earlier). At this point I’ve seen enough of my artist’s work to have a *better* idea of what the page is going to look like, and sometimes I can almost see a frame in my mind, but it’s more a “knowing” what it looks like than seeing what it looks like. I *know* what my husband looks like, but I can’t draw up an image of him in my mind. I could describe him well enough for you to, though, probably.
Interesting, thanks for explaining. :) *purrs at MizKit cheerily*
You’re welcome!
I dream and daydream in movie format. Except that I’m actually in the movie in my dreams. Motion, visuals, sound, emotion. My dreams are more surreal and my daydreams are more guided.
Wow! This visualizing discussion has been an eye opener. I thought everyone visualized the same way. When I read, it’s like watching a movie.
Your books are fantastic. Just finished TF and your descriptions are great. Joyce
This is so wierd… I don’t have visual images either- I’m a word girl all the way. I had no idea it wasn’t what everyone did. I have to research this.
What caught me was the daydreams and falling asleep conversation. Since I can remember, I have always told myself word stories to fall asleep (only works if you are boring yourself and that is not a good sign) and pass the time. The comment about sheep- I never could count sheep, I could only count. It wasn’t much fun so I guessed it worked well enough. When I’m reading, no images there either. That’s why I LOVE movies from my favorite books(and hate them when so many fail me).
This is wierd. I was only doing a little internet-author stalking. BTW, I just read your books and I really like them!!!
I like this topic, too. =)
I can’t visualize at all. When I’m reading, I have this vague sense that there is a movie playing, but it’s just out of my peripheral brain-vision, because I can’t quite see it.
I daydream in words, too, but more important to the daydream are my emotional or physical reactions to what I’m daydreaming about. And I’m really good at that, which is why I can’t fly. When I start thinking about it, my heart rate goes up and I get a rush of adrenaline.
I have extremely vivid dreams almost every night. I see color and can both feel and smell in the dreams. Also, if I’m not dreaming vividly for any extended period of time, it’s a sign I’m depressed again. I can’t decide if I become depressed because I’m not dreaming, or if the dreaming stops because I’m depressed, but I think it’s the latter. Does that happen to anyone else?
Whoops, that was from me =)