I get swimming colors, like I’m pressing down on my eyeballs, when I try to WILD… but they’re so slight… it’s almost like the slight colors you get when your eyes are closed normally.
Would that qualify as HI? What is HI normally like?
Just bringing this topic to the top of the topic listing… I really want an answer
I get two types:
- the colours thing. I sometimes interuptmyself going to sleep with a noise buzzing in my ears and pulsating, hypnotic colours
- More commonly I can get to the point where a still image just appears out of the blackness.Usually as soon as Inotice it it dissapears. Does this count as Hypnogogic Imagery?
I sometimes get pictures, which look as crisp as a photo then other times i get short video clips but they never last more than 20secs or so.
This is usually happens right after i wake up.
I always thought hI were those short “videoclips”, displaying very wierd, abstract associations an such.
For me HI is quite sharp picture, which evolves all the time.
There can be anything you can imagine, and what you don’t. 
The complexity of those transformations is quite unbelievable, strange camera runs, objects moving and changing to other objects etc.
At the start there usually are strange colors flowing, and in some point these more complex images appears, and at the end the scenery gets better dimensions and so starts to look more and more like a ‘real’ enviroment, where our ld can be started.
To me,it is like two similiar things are running parallel:
I first see colours with my eyes,floating.After some time i can see geometric shapes or (very common) faces or parts of faces (eyes usually).They look at me,move,and then go back into the floating colours.It can get more complex,but it is almost uncontrollable.This is the HI,i think.
At the same time i have other pictures in my head.But i don´t see them with my eyes,it´s like they are in the back of my head,my thoughts,films that i see with my “inner eye”.It´s “normal” imagination, i have some control over it.
Then,at a certain point,they begin to mix.It is like my thoughts suddenly are in front of my eyes,or the colours are within my head…
At this point i have normally already lost my counciousness,so i don´t try to control the images,and i don´t think about them,i just watch.I think this is the beginning of dreams.
Traumgänger
Hypnogogic imagery are the lights, images and sensations that your eyes pick up or create when they are closed and readying for sleep. Mine span from patterns of light to shooting stars or actual visual imagery. Most of mine don’t last very long as my mind flicks from thought to thought. I might see a chevy cavalier and then a vampire and then a wheel of swiss cheese. Most of the time my HI starts with just patterns of light and then gradually the images become more objective. Sometimes the impression of their closeness to my face seems real enough to make me physically flinch away from them.
My question is this… one of the techniques laid out by LaBerge is to watch these images, keeping a passive and objective train of thought as they form themselves into a dream. I understand that this is difficult and I have tried but never succeed in maintaining consciousness. Anyone very successful with this method?