Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want

Gretta Duleba; johnswentworth

When John told me (Gretta) his practice of “visioning,” I was skeptical at first. I gave it a try, a little bit out of spite, to show him I was capable of it.

It blew me away.

Here’s what I told him about it a few days later, edited for brevity and clarity.

Something internal really felt different. Awake, alive, hungry, energetic. Selfish. A little angry. Do you know the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad? Ignore the specific words and politics and computer-adness of it all, and just feel the energy of the woman with the hammer. That energy.
Holy shit. What the fuck. What kind of drug did you give me?
I sat on it for a few hours, getting dinner ready, doing parenting things, trying to think what to do with it. I mean, obviously, the answer was "mainline that drug."
I don't really trust epiphanies. I don't really trust this. If there were a prediction market for "will Gretta think this was a breakthrough [in one month]" I would probably bet that market to about 15%. But... 15% is a lot.

I started visioning four months ago and I do still think it was a breakthrough. I’d resolve that market YES.

What is visioning?

Visioning is concretely imagining amazing, detailed fantasies, usually of the future or of a better way the world could be. The fantasies are often completely unrealistic.

A John-vision:

You know what would be cool? Living in a big ominous-looking tower, over the top of an underground labyrinth, spending my days genetically engineering monsters to inhabit the labyrinth and eat intruders. Yeah, that sounds fun. I could probably enjoy that for a century at least.

Visioning is not necessarily about changing your life directly. It’s not about visualizing outcomes and then figuring out a step-by-step plan to get there (though it can sometimes be that). It’s about thinking much bigger than that, not settling for less, breaking free of local maxima and naming an absolutely amazing thing you would want, if you could have anything at all.

What visioning does for us

We think visioning (or something like it) is a pretty big deal for being a whole, agentic person and living your best life by staying in touch with what your heart wants.

If you’ve become a corporate climber or family builder or effective altruist who’s living their principles in a detached, dead-inside kind of way, we think visioning might help you find yourself again.

When we vision, we’re more creative. We have more fun. We get more of what we want, and not by taking more in zero-sum games, just by having better ideas. If anything, the people around us are also getting more of what they want, because we’re doing more and generating more.

Some example John-visions

There's some kind of emotion-cluster which I associate with a vision of a snowy forest at night. Sometimes the vision includes a dogsled, sometimes it's just me and I can see my breath. Other times there's some kind of ball or wedding party in a clearing of the woods (under space heaters) with lanterns and a path there lined with lights - I associate that version with the song "Under The Violet Moon". Still other times the vision connects to an actual memory from sledding - some family friends back in Connecticut have a nice little tubing trail down a hill in the woods, and I remember walking up that hill with a sled, a couple lanterns overhead, one night maybe 10 years ago. Anyway, when I'm in a certain mood, versions of this vision sometimes hit, and I want to be out in the snowy woods at night.

Since I was a kid, I've wanted to make a small stable cloud indoors. Seems like a pretty tractable project, but it would have a lot of fiddly details to sort out and problems to solve. Then, various bonus challenges, like e.g. make hail or lightning.

Some example Gretta-visions

I want to become a tattoo artist, but I don’t want to put anything ugly on someone’s actual skin, so I want to have a steady supply of vat-grown skin to tattoo for practice. And then I want to use the better practice pieces as, like, book covers and coin purses and stuff.

We take our hovercar to Home Depot. It’s black and sleek and has a two-player mode. Today I’m driving while you man the laser guns, shooting the other cars, and letting me know when to dodge their shots. Car-shooting doesn’t hurt anyone, it just means we get to go faster, cut them off, whatever. You’re a good shot and I nimbly scoot our car into the flow of traffic in the spaces you vacate for me. Close to our exit I slingshot around the exit gravitopole and shoot into the parking slot at Home Depot, their grappling hooks grabbing us and pulling us to a smooth stop. We high five as we exit the vehicle.

I want to make the living room I share with my kids into a magical multidimensional place to read and to dance.
Magical: Kind of a witchy, purple-blue-black vibe. Glowing lamps. Crystals. Dragons. Moons. Sigils. Trees. Draped fabrics. Golden fairy lights. We can cover all the windows; the views are no good. If we have any “windows” they can be in arbitrary locations and open onto otherworldly landscapes.
Multidimensional: You can climb up into either of a pair of loft nooks that are isolated from each other. You can scramble through a tunnel into a hiding spot with oddly placed windows and mirrors.
For reading: Everywhere is soft and cozy and has good reading light and pillows and blankets. Lots of parts of the structure are also bookcases, plus more bookcases along one wall. A large soft place in one corner for reading out loud together as a group. A spot that is specifically comfortable for a Gretta to read.
For dancing: Most of the floor left open. Maybe there’s a rug there, but it’s easy to roll out of the way. A decent bluetooth speaker.

I actually did most of that last one, all but the dancing part. We have monkey bars on the ceiling instead of the tunnel. It was a huge amount of work but it makes me and my kids extremely happy.

John’s history with visioning

“But personally, I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cure for aging. I want weekend trips to the moon. I want flying cars and an indestructible body and tiny genetically-engineered dragons.” - John, six years ago

I think most children do a lot of visioning by default. It’s part of their usual play and imagination. I just… chose not to stop.

When I was 11 years old, as my 12th birthday was approaching, I noticed that people younger than me usually had visions, dreams, ambitions. They wanted to go to space or become President, they wanted a robot companion or unicorn, they wanted to fly or grow into a giant. But the people older than me generally did not have such dreams. Clearly something happened to nearly everyone as they got older, such that they gave up on their dreams and decided to get married, buy a house and have 2.5 kids instead. I was terrified that would happen to me.

So I swore very hard not to do that, not to forget the dreams and visions, not to stop generating them. And that basically worked. I didn’t learn visioning; I just never stopped doing it.

Gretta’s history with visioning

John got me into visioning. We stumbled across it in conversation when he typical-minded and assumed I was already doing it, but I was not.

I had many of the puzzle pieces: operationalization of ambitious goals, correctly predicting what my future self would want, getting quiet and hearing my inner voice.

But I was overly focused on pragmatically forward-chaining into achievable futures. And because I am so good at executive function, I often tried to manage multi-person systems by calculating the win/win for everyone and making it happen. I often forgot to be selfish enough: I was catering to my kids or my partners at times when they didn’t need to be catered to. I was settling for nearby easy results and missing leaps into other, juicier parts of search space.

Now that I’ve been visioning almost-daily for four months, I find myself spontaneously rejecting bland plans and improving on them almost effortlessly in real time. “Oh, we can do better than that!” is a surprisingly useful thought-habit.

Finding your heart

The “voice of god”

Aella gave a really good speech at SlutCon last year in which she described something she calls the “voice of god.” The word “god” is doing no theological work, so rename it if it bothers you.

The voice of god, as I remember Aella describing it, is not about anything external to you. It is about the truest version of yourself, that which lives at your core, that which is unbowed by other people’s expectations. It’s about what you really, truly value, when you’re being fully honest with yourself, when you shed all pretense, drop all facades, and get in touch with your raw and unvarnished essence.

This idea is not original to Aella, of course; it’s very old. Related concepts include the daimon (by Socrates, who said it warned him off wrong action), the Self (by Richard Schwartz in Internal Family Systems), the Inner Light (by Quakers), or terminal values (if you’re into utility functions and that sort of thing).

Visioning gets you in touch with your voice of god.

How to do it / best practices

Gretta’s method

Visioning took me (Gretta) quite a long time the first few times I tried it. The first night I tried, I had to patiently acknowledge and dismiss all kinds of obstacle-thoughts for about forty-five minutes before the actual visions started to flow. These days, it’s much easier. I usually generate something within just a few minutes unless I’m very tired or distracted.

Here’s what it looks like for me:

I decide I’m going to do some visioning. I do this most nights sometime in the hour before bed.
I stop and get quiet. I turn off any potential distractions. I close my eyes.
Sometimes I just open myself up and see what comes. Other times I think about “what bugged me today, that I’d like a great solution to” or “when it comes to ___, what would a wildly good outcome look like?”
Then… I wait. Usually something relevant pops up. Other times, other thoughts come, and I acknowledge and dismiss them and open myself back up again.
When I have enough of a sense of the vision, I start writing it down.
As I write, I often realize I don’t quite have it. It’s not concrete enough, or it’s got a big hole in it, or it’s not actually quite the thing I want.
I close my eyes and let my brain try again.
When I’m done, I usually have something between a few sentences and a single screen full of text.
Usually at that point I ship it to John, because he likes reading them. Sometimes I send it to other people I’m close to or I keep it to myself.

John’s method

Intentional visioning is basically intentional daydreaming, for me. Rather than drifting into a daydream by accident, I just choose to do it. I let my attention relax, and let imagination run.

Sometimes my attention goes to my space - e.g. I notice my screen, and imagine a better version of it, like a wall of monitors. Or I notice my balcony, and imagine being able to climb over the railing and walk through the air.

Other times, my attention goes to whatever emotions I’m feeling. Maybe I have some pent up frustration, and my imagination conjures a fighting ring in a basement where I let loose. Or maybe I’m horny, and I imagine whatever would best scratch that itch right now. Or maybe I’m just tired, and I imagine going into a pod and sleeping for a hundred years.

Other times, my attention goes to something I’ve been ruminating on. Or my attention zooms out to my local community, or society. Or my attention turns to some cool thing I encountered in a book or movie. Wherever my attention is drawn, I let my imagination run wild in that direction.

And then, once I’ve started to imagine anything at all, I flesh it out.

The fleshing-out is where more intentional steering comes in. I make sure it’s concrete, add details, pay attention to what feels right and back up if it doesn’t feel quite right. At some point I start writing it down.

Best practices

Writing it down is not mandatory but does seem to help with concreteness and fidelity-to-yourself.
Do check if you’ve really produced a vision – something concrete you really want – or if you’ve missed the mark and written what you’re “supposed” to want or something that would sound cool to other people but isn’t actually your thing. Weave back and forth between what you wrote and your inner self, making sure your inner self feels “fuck yeah” about what you wrote.
Keep your visions to yourself, until/unless you’re very confident that you’re not warping your visions to please your audience. If you’re sharing with someone else, you need to be comfortable being uncool/disappointing/not-ideal in their eyes, or your visions will end up twisted.
Practice visioning frequently until it’s flowing easily. After that you might still want to do it frequently because it’s fun and to stay in practice. We’re not sure how much frequency matters.
Some visions will be attainable! Go ahead and enact some, but probably not all, of those.

Does this work for people who are not us?

We don’t know, but we’d like to find out! See the open questions section at the end.

We taught a workshop on visioning at LessOnline in June, 2026. After the workshop we surveyed the participants to find out what happened next.

We didn’t get enough responses for anything better than anecdata, but here are a few responses, quoted with permission:

it came easily and made me feel happy. and was more useful than my typical, more realistic daydreaming

I found it hard to balance between steering and letting it run freely. Sometimes I got stuck on specific images, songs or things. Trying to write while visioning is also kind of hard, i mostly end up summarizing afterwards or iteratively.

was nice at workshop, did it a couple more times over next couple of days. didn't really stick as a habit. the types of visions were starting from things in real life (or some fictional settings) and then proceeding to make them more optimized to me, usually becoming somewhat more sci-fi/fantasy in the process. was nice for reconnecting with my emotions.

It was really fun! Good to know that I can just... have a good time wherever I am. It's a button you can push to enjoy yourself whenever you want. It's one of those things that's completely obvious once it's pointed out; I've enjoyed idly fantasizing about things in the past, but somehow it never occurred to me I could sit down to deliberately spend time doing that. I didn't notice any particular effects after the session.

Overall, although the feedback is mostly positive, these are not the kind of spectacular results that we have experienced. We don’t have enough data at this point to draw any conclusions. We are hoping that explaining it better will help with some of the execution issues.

Failure modes and drawbacks

Here are some things that can go wrong when you vision.

Not concrete enough. This is by far the most common failure mode and you can fix it just by noticing and iterating on that.

Wanting but not getting is painful. Some people we have spoken to do not want to try visioning because they are afraid it will hurt too much. They’re probably right that it will hurt. I (Gretta) find that the visions that are just out of reach, almost-but-not-quite-attainable, are the most likely to feel painful. There’s more than one way to relate to that pain. I like all thoughts to be thinkable, so I try to practice acceptance of the not-getting and have the visions anyway, and I think that’s the right tradeoff for me.

Actually implementing visions can be expensive. Just because you can think of an awesome idea, and that idea happens to be attainable, does not mean that you should actually do it. You have to look at costs, including opportunity costs. Ideally you can find ways to cheaply prototype, or to abandon projects that don’t feel right after you’ve invested just a little.

Note that doggedly implementing all of the attainable visions might, perversely, cause you to be worse at visioning. Your brain might begin to associate visioning with very costly follow-up actions, and refuse to cough up the visions for fear you’ll try to do them all.

Have great ideas, and then let them go. Doing them all was never the point. Knowing yourself better was the point.

Visions with other people in them are tricky. While it can be very powerful to imagine other people acting in exactly the way you wish, don’t lose track of the fact that real life people may have other goals and motivations and not want to act out your scripts. It may be more helpful instead to have a vision about an arbitrary, non-specific person, like “my ideal friend.” (You can make your ideal friend unrealistically awesome, if you want to.) Or you can leave another specific person exactly as they are, but your vision can be about how you behave in relation to them. (You can give yourself superpowers if you want to.)

Getting in touch with yourself may have large ripple effects. Let’s say you’ve been sleepwalking through life, kind of dead inside. If you wake up, then things might change. That’s great! And also, that might be a pretty big deal!

We’ve talked to some other people who did visioning-like activities and then realized that they were badly off course in life and they wanted to rip up their careers and/or their relationships and start over. Probably that was all for the best? We think? It’s hard to say. You’ve been warned.

Related work / What visioning is not

We can’t possibly be the first people to practice the thing we call “visioning.” Even so, when we look around at related techniques, all of the related practices we found are actually different in identifiable ways.

Focusing is one of the closest matches. It’s about getting in touch with yourself, and the weaving-back-and-forth mental motion is the same. However, in its purest form, straight out of the Gendlin book by the same name, focusing starts by identifying a “felt sense” about a problem or a concern, rather than by throwing open the mental gates and letting something new and amazing show up. Visioning also has a heavy emphasis on concreteness and specificity in a fantasy, whereas focusing is more about putting your finger on that felt sense.

The Miracle Question from solution-focused brief therapy is another similar technique. The miracle question asks you to assume your problem has already been solved, and then to concretely imagine the first tiny detail that will be different as a result. It’s very grounded in the concrete and sensory, but it has to do with the solution to a specific, present-day problem, and the changes are meant to be realistic.

Manifesting was made popular by a self-help book called The Secret. You imagine that you’re rich, or working in a new career, or muscular, and then by imagining it hard enough, the “Law of Attraction” causes the universe to help your fantasy come true. Manifesting is about attainable, if ambitious, goals, and uses some combination of magical thinking and forward/backward-chaining to get you where you want to go. It’s possible to attach manifesting to your voice of god but that’s not the way it’s usually depicted or practiced.

Worldbuilding for Speculative Fiction uses a lot of the same mental muscles as visioning. The fantasies you create when you write SF are usually extremely detailed and concrete, but they’re not always connected to the voice of god of the author – most authors don’t crave dystopian futures, for example.

The full list of related work was too long to include inline in this blog post, but if you know of something we missed, please comment and let us know.

Open questions and future work

There’s a lot we don’t know about visioning.

How many people do anything like this at all? How many people do exactly this? How readily can it be learned? What’s the best way to teach it? What are the prerequisites or foundational pieces that make visioning easier to learn? What effects do people experience? What are the contraindications? What causes people not to like it or to bounce off?

We’re pretty busy with our day jobs, but we’re slowly chipping away at these questions.

If you try visioning, we’d love to hear from you. Tell us about it in the comments, or fill out our survey. We’re also going to revise our LessOnline workshop and teach it again at SlutCon in late September, with a special focus on visioning for sex.

I notice I am confused. This does not seem like a very John Wentworth-coded practice, from the limited view of John I've gotten through his writing. This seems much more woo-ish than that, and kind of ridiculous at a first pass? Like John spends some time sitting around imagining living in a volcano tower? And this makes him more effective? Huh?

My deflationary hypothesis is that this is inducing something like hypomania. I've gotten a similar-seeming feeling from reading the really ambition-inducing parts of ratfics like HPMOR.

This also feels like a technique running in the opposite direction to basically every rationalist technique that I've managed to get mileage out of. Almost everything I find useful feels like a process of mental cooling. This seems like the opposite? A mental heating?

Perhaps this is useful in the same way that bipolar people are (allegedly) the most creative, since repeated hypomania and depression lead to cycles of babble and prune/annealing/whatever you want to call it.

To me, it's not surprising that John thinks it's important to his effectiveness. I would guess that most (for example) tech startup founders are like this; and according to Asimov half of the scientists he knows that he considers creative have some interest in sci-fi. You need to be a bit of a wild-eyed dreamer to make wild-eyed dreams a reality.

Really, my only objection is that I tend to want to have dreams that are a bit more realistic.

Having read pretty much all of Johns posts and comments I am not at all surprised? John has a comment somewhere where he mentions that he is not opposed to things seeming woo? Trying to avoid woo seeming ideas is part of my J Bostock model (some post you explicitly mention this), not my John Wentworth model so I think you might be typical minding. Wizard Power? His post on (Fantasy) -> (Planning) directly talks about this visioning. Just look at his date-me doc from a year ago (tiny genetically engineered dragons), he wants to fix aging and live forever?

I agree this probably induces hypomania as evidenced by the fact that I accidentally stumbled into this visioning or a closely related practice recently while thinking about (how to be more strategic)/(how to optimize the universe directly)/(how to view the future directly (scope insensitivity is skill issue)) and I went manic for a week so badly I had to pull all levers including reducing the dose on my ADHD stimulant medication to become at all stable again and to be able to have a sleep rythm compatible with my job. I called it timeless meditation. I have more thoughts on this but I am still writing them up. John was one of few people I directly wrote about what I was doing while still manic since he seemed to have figured out a convergent idea. I have only once before gotten even close to this manic where I had to reduce my medication (though this time was worse) when I got hired by Genesmith as an intern on a cool project after scrambling with random projects and being quite broke for a year. I maybe got slightly manic from munchkin rationalism content before, but as far as I remember not as badly. To be fair a bunch of other stuff also changed for me downstream of moving 1 month ago, so causal attribution is tricky.

You're right, this probably was somewhat predictable. I think what's happened is that my woo-alarm is binarized in an unhelpful way. Wizard power seems obviously metaphorical in a way that doesn't trip it. Fantasy -> planning likewise seems like a mental exercise that builds up muscles for non fantastical things.

I am tentatively adding "induces (hypo)mania?" as something to watch out for with visioning; I will think more about it and be on the lookout as other people try this and report back.

John is one of the least emotional labile people I know and I am very confident visioning does not induce hypomania in him. (I am a former therapist with training in assessing this kind of thing.)

It is of course much more difficult to assess myself accurately, but what I can tell you is that I had one very strong and noticeable mindset shift when I first started visioning and then that settled into something durable and useful. It did not come with a decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, or impulsive decisions.

None of that is to say that the same practice wouldn't affect others differently and I'll keep an eye on it.

I suspect John has more practice by now and is in equilibrium with regards to this skill and other skills and had less practice when he lost money on highly leveraged forex trades he mentions in his idea scarcity post. Personally I was aware that I was bottlenecked on knowing what I want so I was looking for munchkin ways of fixing that and now found enough techniques that I noticed I had to slow down and shouldn't try to go too quickly all at once. I had racing thoughts and decreased need for sleep and made impulsive decisions, but mostly optimized for not very costly ones even when I didn't know what was going on was pretty typical manic symptoms. People have very different constraints. N=1. Also I read the full post and not just the introduction now and updated that this vision skill is only an important subskill of the thing that got me autocatalytic.

Given your comment, I will correspondingly downgrade my estimate that this is doing that, or maybe I'm pointing at something colloquially similar to hypomania but which actually doesn't have those downsides. Perhaps I am reading too much into this; I don't on reflection think HPMOR actually induced clinical hypomania in me. Maybe more like a kind of overconfidence in my own importance? I'm also not sure whether this kind of thing is actually bad or not (HPMOR definitely worsened by epistemics in the short term, in part due to this effect).

Hypomania might be a little too far. For me I see it as a way of accessing ideas in a way that my standard thought processes cannot build to. Most of my thinking can be thought of as hill climbing, taking whatever thing I want and trying to go in the direction that seems the steepest towards what I want. Of course that kind of thinking is limited by local maximums. Visioning is your chance to teleport your self all over the mountain range, go in random directions, and see if you stumble across any higher peaks. In doing so you will find yourself mounting peaks higher than a rational approach could have brought you. It also helps give you confidence in the peaks you have reached if you end up in a similar spot every time you play the game.

My favorite example was figuring out how to decorate my guest room. Initially I could only think it needed a bed, a bed side table, and dresser maybe. So I started visioning thinking about staying at a friends house and imagining what the least likely and fantastical set up their guest bedroom might look like. I kept coming back to the idea of a room full of antiques. I delighted in the concept of forcing guests to be surrounded by seemingly fragile and expensive objects that were simultaneously a beautiful and a little creepy. Each object would be a curio that a guest could enjoy if they got bored while the uncanny stares of Victorian paintings watched. Beautifully contrasted by my admittedly brutalist preferences for the rest of the house. and I just so happened to have access to a trove of collectibles in the form of my late grandmother's inheritance that had been languishing in my dad's storage container for a few years. Now I have a beautifully decorated guestroom that I affectionally call the dowager suite in which guests are bemused, bewitched, and befuddled. I have continued building my collection of antiques in it as well.

My most common visioning is imagining what about ifs. Like what if I won the lottery or could time travel backwards 24 hours, or had the ability to persuade anybody of anything. What I find interesting about each scenario isn't the fantastical nature of the ability but the reflective consistency of each theoretical version of myself. I always seem to want to spend more time with friends, read more physical books, spend more time on a beach, be in better shape, and drive less. Some goals like being god emperor remain impossible, but many of the themes that come up in visioning are remarkably mundane and very achievable. I've just reasoned myself into a rut by rarely considering if I could have those things without divine intervention (see cached thoughts). I have to teleport to another mountain mentally to realize that I haven't truly reached the peak of the personal mountain that I am climbing. So I can take those themes and then use my rational brain to come up with interventions that achieve them without needing super natural abilities. This practice has helped improve my life immensely. To put it shortly it reveals my unconscious or repressed preferences and allows me to overcome cached thoughts. However a more rational version of myself might be able to accomplish this without visioning.

Since I was a kid, I've wanted to make a small stable cloud indoors. Seems like a pretty tractable project, but it would have a lot of fiddly details to sort out and problems to solve. Then, various bonus challenges, like e.g. make hail or lightning.

Someone recently told me that this has been done before! I unfortunately can't find a real indoor cloud that sticks around for a while, so probably the person in question is thinking of various second-long 'clouds' or just gas from e.g. boiling liquid nitrogen.

Anyways, you say:

When I was 11 years old, as my 12th birthday was approaching, I noticed that people younger than me usually had visions, dreams, ambitions. They wanted to go to space or become President, they wanted a robot companion or unicorn, they wanted to fly or grow into a giant.

It sounds like I've preserved more of the childish visioning than most adults? Actually it feels like I didn't really do this as a child, and only started in my teens - though maybe I just wasn't tracking any of them as a kid, or having serious plans.

At the end I've put some examples I've thought up at some point in the past, where all but one was imagined after I was about 14.

Possibly related, I have seen a few friends eventually do a gender transition, a couple years after previously bringing up that they considering doing so. This was kinda weird to me, because for me it really just didn't take multiple years from conceiving of the idea to realizing I wanted that. For me, when I was like 14 I came across an r/askreddit question along the lines of "Men, do you want to be a woman, and why?" or something, and within hours my only remaining uncertainty was whether I was trans-female or genderfluid.

The idea of considering "do I want to look like a woman?", especially if in a social group with trans people, and then... not knowing your answer for years... it really surprised me!

I suspect my deviance here is related to the fact that basically none of the people I know will ever say something even at the level of "I wish I could fly", whereas I definitely do.

I don't really know what's going on when I come up with this stuff. A lot of these just... came into my mind somehow. Intentionally doing it kinda just feels like... trying, and then magically results come out? I just scan across stuff I like, or random other stuff if nothing's coming, and then wait until something starts tugging at my desire. Then I follow the tug.

Perhaps it helps if you ask "what would be really cool to my inner 12 year old/14 year old/whatever"? This doesn't usually help me though, I'm better off asking what would be cool to me right now.

Now for the list:

About a month ago, I wanted to be able to lean back, in midair, and have the air support we so that I can kick my feet up and waggle them - heels would be a good fit while doing this. I'm unsure if I thought of this dream before, but I happened to be wearing heels a month ago and so the desire was stronger. I expect this would be difficult to simulate with magnetically levitating chairs (which I realized are surely buildable with current tech, and I now want one) mostly because getting the 'feel' right is hard. Some time ago I thought about attaching bungee cords to myself and to walls or a ceiling, but when I think about it now it doesn't seem like it'll work?
When I was a teen, I was planning to get a magnet implanted in my finger. I even had this whole plan of strategically befriending medical students in college so I could ask someone to insert it for me. I no longer think the current magnet implant techniques are worth it (they fade in a few years and screw you over if you need an MRI later, and also SURGERY), but wish I could just get the magnet anyways. I also saw a laser rangefinder that would vibrate the magnet according to detected distance, which would be pretty cool! That one seemed too bulky, but possibly could be made into a ring-like thing on the pad of your finger, or maybe a single-finger-glove thing.
I once saw someone put some glowy powder (strontium aluminate) into their cleavage. It didn't look that good on them but I love the idea of having glowing spots on your skin. Main downside is, you know, having to CUT INTO YOUR SKIN, and irreversibility, but thinking about it now makes me wonder if there's a way to stick on temporary glowing stuff. (not just flourescent paint... but also now I want to put flourescent paint on me...).
I also wanted a robot arm as a teen. It doesn't even have to be that fancy, just something that goes on my tricep, can hold and pour soda into my mouth, and can keep itself level when I move my elbow. I still plan on doing this someday.
I want to be able to talk to you without talking to you. That is, without any sound coming out of my mouth. One possibility is electromyography detecting my subvocalizations (by this I mean you still have to move your muscles - imagine speaking but without pushing air out) - I saw some grad student explain how he did this with an ML model to turn the signals into predicted audio versions from some data of him reading and subvocally reading some text, and the outputs were surprisingly good. Pair this with bone conduction, and somehow manage to only use electrodes below the face so that you can hide it with a coat or scarf, and you could pull a pretty neat magic trick.
I want those infrared contact lenses I saw in the news, that convert some infrared light to visible! Ideally I want some head-mounted set of lenses/goggle toggles to let me see various things, kinda like that scene from spy-kids and closer to another scene I have vague memories of from some movie/tv show I can't remember.
Some romantic escapades that I won't describe here.
Non-sentient mimicries of various species of animal (including squirrels and humans), so that I can get the experience of torturing one without having to actually hurt a real one. Further detail omitted.
You know the gravity defying hair that anime characters have? I'd like that please! Ideally it'd be controllable with my mind. Closest currently realizable analogs: just try really hard to style it, to give a static gravity defying one; replace my hair with synthetics that have motors to move them. This... seems maybe possible in some way?
As a kid, I wanted to hangout with friends... but in SPAAAAAAACE. That still sounds cool to me.
I, too, would like a cool house... but unlike the other examples here, imagining that detail feels like work. I think aesthetics often feel like this to me - I like the results, or imagining stuff I've already thought of, but fleshing out new ones is an effortful task of iterating to find something I want. The above ideas come readily, and don't require a bunch of effortful imaginary fiddling.
I wish I could drastically change my voice on command, like a professional voice actor. I can think of a few characters in various media with voice acting I would like to be able to do. Probably this is not worth the cost of actually training, but I would like to at least have an epic maniacal laugh.
I wish I could make my irises purple. I don't think purple contact lenses will work well enough on my brown eyes, but I plan to give it a try.
Minor telekinesis would just be really cool. I'd love to have stuff dance around me in midair, or have dozens of darts flying above me start shooting out.
I think I'd like to have some sort of spikes at the end of my fingers, ideally rock-like and black, perhaps as part of a gauntlet or other metal glove-armor thing. Then I could tap-tap-tap with them. This is somewhat like what people do with long nails, except it's very important that it's level with the fingertip, instead of the fingernail. Kinda like this picture (but various important details like material, color, and the style are all wrong):

Speaking of, there's an image in my head of the full-body version of that, like a thin rock-golem -humanoid - I'm not sure how to explain it. I'd like to be able to turn into that sometimes.
I want to see Saturn's hexagon up close! The rings too, but especially the hexagon! But only the hexagon when it has cooler colors - it apparently looked cooler in 2013 compared to 2017. I expect to be kinda underwhelmed though, most landscape-like sights tend to do that - e.g. when I saw an Aurora I was disappointed.
Someone should make an art planet. That is, an entire planet whose sole purpose is to look pretty from orbit.
I'd like to casually talk with a whole bunch of famous people, but ideally in a way that doesn't involve any social risk to me. I could, say, be disguised, and have the conversation be non-public, so that it emotionally feels like I can say whatever I want.
Ears look weird. I'm not sure what it is but anytime I pay attention to them they start bugging me. I think we should maybe get rid of them. Those robots that don't have ears know what's up.
Of the ways one could fly, I'd want a jetpack. Probably a steampunk one. Ideally it's kinda small and unassuming, and looks like it shouldn't even be able to fly - as if some idiot just added a couple gas canisters and nozzles to a mundane backpack.
I wish I could see people's organs through their skin, like how Superman's 'X-ray' vision is supposed to work.
I want to have some magic system or something that required understanding algebraic topology or other 'shapey' math to wield, in a way where mathematical facts would have implications for the way the magic works, and where incrementally improving your understanding directly translates into increased magical power. I'm still kinda sad that physical applications of that stuff are lacking.
I wish my friends were more talkative, more excitable/enthusiastic, regularly infodumped cool (by my standards) stuff to me, and engaged in interesting ways with what I say. My closest friends can typically do the last one, but not the rest.
I wish my friends were more attractive. Apparently some people aren't like this, but to me it's like having a beautiful artpiece on your wall.
I wish there was something like alcohol but that doesn't make me dumber, doesn't make my working memory go caput, and where a certain sort of perceptual effect (which is what seems to be much of the cause of drunken stumbling) could be dialed down at will.
I wish I had a small and lightweight flask attached to my clothing that could somehow still store multiple liters of water, like a decanter of endless water. That'd be so nice! I really wish water wasn't so heavy and didn't take up so much space.
I'd like a piece of quartz on a necklace, along with a little spring hammer (like in a hinge-pin remover) and an LED in hopes of using the piezoelectric effect to light it up. Even better if it can make a spark capable of setting stuff on fire. I plan on making this someday.
A couple piercings that I worry would be too painful or too inconvenient to actually get, like one on my tongue, lip, and nose.

I was originally skeptical that coming up with more ideas right now would do anything. Indeed, most of those ideas are stuff I've already thought of.

However, the finger spikes are a new idea... and there are a couple appealing ones on amazon! Likewise, while endless decanters aren't really on the cards yet, I realize that it'd be nice to have some water with me for those times where I'm really thirsty.

So I guess even I don't daydream enough!

The only downsides of fingerspikes are the obvious impracticalities, which aren't worse than I expected (hard to use objects, they hurt a little to wear for a long period unless you don't secure them that well, they take more than zero seconds to put on). They are otherwise quite cool! If the idea of fingerspikes seems obviously appealing to you and you have ten bucks, I recommend them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F434WTR7. As typical for my experience with cheap amazon purchases, they look worse than in the advertising, but still look quite good in person.

I want those infrared contact lenses I saw in the news, that convert some infrared light to visible! Ideally I want some head-mounted set of lenses/goggle toggles to let me see various things, kinda like that scene from spy-kids and closer to another scene I have vague memories of from some movie/tv show I can't remember.

For cool views, the lenses in this kind of 3D-glasses are a good start. They have distinct RGB channels for each eye, so in-principle you get six primary-colors (though they're not spread as evenly across the spectrum as we'd like). The lenses are larger than visible from the outside, you can remove them and cut out good-sized pieces for glasses.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/358199648773J
I've spent a lot of time with these, they're awesome. Otherwise you can try just removing one lens from a set of brown sunglasses or something; you can find still some cool things, since one eye's still doing something weird.

In the spirit of the comment-section, now I'm imagining a cool multiple lens (like a multifocal or a progressive lens).
You could have a very small rainbow pattern repeating across a lens (horizontally or vertically, or in some optimized Sudoku-ish pattern?), and sort of effectively have hyperspectral vision (even if you're color-blind!). I've found it hurts emotionally that I don't have that.
I guess I can make mock-ups of what things'd look like, by editing hyperspectral photographs and videos. I'll probably ask Claude to do that.
You could stick colored lenses on a VR headset with multiple cameras close together, from those back out a good basis over camera-space, and interleave such emulated camera-feeds. You could try using AI or whatever to adjust for the parallax.
Even a poor and mild version of any of this would be extremely cool. I do hope to at least make some simple multiple lenses; two views comprising six primary-colors just aren't enough.

That link appears to be dead now, do you have other descriptors (brand? name?) about the product?

The problem with just adding more primary colors to a display is that my eyes are still using only three types of cones. Adding extra primaries will at best let you explore a bit more of the region of colors than a normal monitor can. The advantage of converting other spectra to the visible is so that I can see it at all, even if it looks identical to a normal color - basically, false-color for my eyes.

Dolby 3D glasses. They're meant for Dolby's old home laser projectors. Other discussions might've called them "hexachromatic glasses".

Sorry for unclarity, I only meant to talk about normal screens. If you want more colors on a display you should just get better LEDs, it's pretty silly to add an extra "primary" unless this is very important to you (or you're very rich).
Three types of cone times two eyes makes six color channels.
Yeah, infrared and stuff sounds great. I was already talking about a kind of false-color though, so that doesn't help explain.

@AprilSR just released a VR game of distinguishing such colors. So you should try it if you have VR.
Probably this kind of effect should be in ~all VR games, it's wonderful.

https://apriiori.com/dichoptic-vr/

These are great, thank you so much!

My first two thoughts on reading this:

isn't this called "having a fantasy"?
reverse half of the advice you hear

I think 'reverse half the advice you hear' doesn't much apply to something like "here is a novel activity to try".

I disagree. Counterexample to your claim: "Hey kid here's a novel activity to try, take this needle it's a blast". Decoupling note: I am not implicitly intending that the activity suggested by the OP is bad or dangerous like strong drugs.

I didn't make a for-all claim that could have examples and counterexamples; I just meant I think that 'half' is way off. Some types of advice actually equilibrate at about 50% worthwhile, it matters that this type doesn't (if you don't view the blogpost as an unrepresentative example of the reference-class I described).

I barely understand what you just said.

To check my comprehension: If in my thread opener I said "reverse 10% of the advice you hear that suggests trying novel activities" instead of "reverse half of the advice you hear", would you have agreed then?

That's better, but it's not as catchy, :(. 60% would also be better than 'half'.
The correct percentage here varies wildly person-to-person.

I think I would've said "everything in moderation" to convey the same sentiment. You can probably find something better than that.

It feels weird that to me, "half" conveys precision while "51%" is clearly an approximation whose exact value isn't important. Usually people talk like they see things the opposite way.

Edit: "Half" means 'as much as not' to me, while "51%" is a stand-in for whatever constant (or function‽) I like. This is hilarious.

Glad you found this!

I suspect I already do this thing when I am not too tired. It shows up in two forms:

Building dreams: when I am not so tired that I fall asleep quickly, I actually build and explore dreams that I enjoy. They fuse with my thoughts and so are often iterative about solving problems in my life or improving things, but just in any way possible. I also experience this after sleeping if I keep dozing. My understanding is that this is hypnogogic processing, and for me subjectively it is my ‘strongest’ thinking mode - both analytically and generatively (creatively)
Problem solving: I tend to really enjoy brainstorming without any fences or limits. I enjoy challenging myself to come up with the ‘weirdest’ or ‘most brilliant’ or ‘least likely’ or ‘most astounding’ idea. Much of that process leans on fantasy injection and then iterating back to reality. It is super fun! 🥰❤️

Anyway, not sure if I missed your point but my intuition is that I similar to John in the ‘I just never stopped imagining things’ department ❤️

Having thought about this some more. I now roughly believe:

What Gretta and John are doing is very likely (85%) basically fine or net positive for them
What Gretta and John are doing is most likely (70%) basically fine or net positive for a random person they teach

But

Some small proportion of people (0.5-15% 90% CI, weighted towards the bottom) who use this based on this post, or similar online dissemination (not in-person) will have a net negative experience because of it

And

In a way I cannot really put my finger on, this smells adjacent to the tactics that rationalist-adjacent cults (Black Lotus, Leverage, Zizians) like to deploy. "You need to break out of what society wants you to want" + "this will energize you" trips this for me. If I imagine that in four years I'm reading an exposé of a cult that spanout in 2026, I can very easily imagine a line like "X made us all sit down and think about what we really wanted. We did this for hours a day. Sometimes some people would share it with the group and we'd be told we hadn't really broken free of societal expectations. Some people claimed it made them more energetic, more powerful." Obviously the way I'm describing this is very different from how you are doing it, but this seems like the kind of thing which spirals from 1 hour/day to 8 hours/day, when social groups hit the cult attractor. It feels particularly risky because, unlike other John Wentworth mental technique posts, it doesn't really come as many gears or caveats. It seems much more "in itself" in a weird way.

Disclaimer 1: I have a very fuzzy picture of this technique and might have gotten it all wrong. This comment is really just explaining my immediate ick with the post, and might partly be rationalization.

Disclaimer 2: I know nothing about those cults I mentioned other than what is publicly available online. I don't have personal experience with them or their members.

Without commenting on any of the rest of this, I'll clarify that I currently spend less than an hour a week on visioning (usually just a few minutes a day) and that I think there are probably rapidly diminishing returns beyond that point, so, uh, please don't spiral, folks.

I feel like basically any good thing can be made bad if you cultify it. This really doesn't seem like something that spirals up to many hours daily. It really does just sound like "try fantasizing".

You also have focused on the "break free from societal expectations" part. Of course, if you focus on that then you are effectively increasing how likely people are to change from wherever they were, and if you have malicious goals or are in a group that's taken over by some all-consuming memes, then 'unsticking' you is a tool to make you adopt whatever crazy stuff they want you to.

If instead this is just called "fantasize about stuff you want", then there's less focus on unsticking you.

I think I've been doing a version of this for most of my life, leaning a little toward world building (but the main point of the world is to be a place where I'd be happy to live, not to tell a story).

Over the years I've started to avoid talking about that because it weirds most people out or they see it as frivolous. When there are other people in my "vision", I try to think of them as p-zombies (if that concept even makes sense).

Makes sense to me! Also maybe talk to more people who are also weird. :)

Likely things can sometimes see unlikely things. (For another example, you can see these made-up people.)
So you can just suppose that, in your fantasy, you (unknowingly) are vastly more real than the other people.

I like the idea but I have a hard time identifying what sets it apart from just fantasizing. Maybe the focus on finding the most awesome vision, or letting go of realism?

Maybe the most similar thing I've done is how I endeavored to be less bad at romance with the opposite sex. It was at a time when I had a good number of data points (including from fiction), but very little personal success. While in bed before sleeping, I would imagine a challenging, uncomfortable scenario with a girl I liked (e.g.: she noticed that I accidentally left my zipper open). I would attack the problem under dozens of angles, playing variations (would I judge her negatively if the roles were reversed? Even if I didn't like her? Do I have a memory of something similar? Can I defuse the situation with a joke? Can the solution be generalized to other shameful situations? Can I turn a shameful situation over and actually score points? etc.) I wouldn't stop until I found a course of action that felt amazing, and a session would last anything from 30 min to 2 hours.

From the blogpost:

Visioning is concretely imagining amazing, detailed fantasies, usually of the future or of a better way the world could be. The fantasies are often completely unrealistic.

It's very important for the fantasies to be concrete, detailed, and amazing; at least starting out, these should be explicit goals.

IIUC it's also very important for the fantasies to in-expectation have benefits other than rest and positive-valence; otherwise there probably wouldn't be a blogpost about them.

My deflationary hypothesis is that this is inducing something like hypomania. I've gotten a similar-seeming feeling from reading the really ambition-inducing parts of ratfics like HPMOR.

Since I was a kid, I've wanted to make a small stable cloud indoors. Seems like a pretty tractable project, but it would have a lot of fiddly details to sort out and problems to solve. Then, various bonus challenges, like e.g. make hail or lightning.

Anyways, you say:

When I was 11 years old, as my 12th birthday was approaching, I noticed that people younger than me usually had visions, dreams, ambitions. They wanted to go to space or become President, they wanted a robot companion or unicorn, they wanted to fly or grow into a giant.

The idea of considering "do I want to look like a woman?", especially if in a social group with trans people, and then... not knowing your answer for years... it really surprised me!

I suspect my deviance here is related to the fact that basically none of the people I know will ever say something even at the level of "I wish I could fly", whereas I definitely do.

Perhaps it helps if you ask "what would be really cool to my inner 12 year old/14 year old/whatever"? This doesn't usually help me though, I'm better off asking what would be cool to me right now.

Now for the list:

About a month ago, I wanted to be able to lean back, in midair, and have the air support we so that I can kick my feet up and waggle them - heels would be a good fit while doing this. I'm unsure if I thought of this dream before, but I happened to be wearing heels a month ago and so the desire was stronger. I expect this would be difficult to simulate with magnetically levitating chairs (which I realized are surely buildable with current tech, and I now want one) mostly because getting the 'feel' right is hard. Some time ago I thought about attaching bungee cords to myself and to walls or a ceiling, but when I think about it now it doesn't seem like it'll work?
When I was a teen, I was planning to get a magnet implanted in my finger. I even had this whole plan of strategically befriending medical students in college so I could ask someone to insert it for me. I no longer think the current magnet implant techniques are worth it (they fade in a few years and screw you over if you need an MRI later, and also SURGERY), but wish I could just get the magnet anyways. I also saw a laser rangefinder that would vibrate the magnet according to detected distance, which would be pretty cool! That one seemed too bulky, but possibly could be made into a ring-like thing on the pad of your finger, or maybe a single-finger-glove thing.
I once saw someone put some glowy powder (strontium aluminate) into their cleavage. It didn't look that good on them but I love the idea of having glowing spots on your skin. Main downside is, you know, having to CUT INTO YOUR SKIN, and irreversibility, but thinking about it now makes me wonder if there's a way to stick on temporary glowing stuff. (not just flourescent paint... but also now I want to put flourescent paint on me...).
I also wanted a robot arm as a teen. It doesn't even have to be that fancy, just something that goes on my tricep, can hold and pour soda into my mouth, and can keep itself level when I move my elbow. I still plan on doing this someday.
I want to be able to talk to you without talking to you. That is, without any sound coming out of my mouth. One possibility is electromyography detecting my subvocalizations (by this I mean you still have to move your muscles - imagine speaking but without pushing air out) - I saw some grad student explain how he did this with an ML model to turn the signals into predicted audio versions from some data of him reading and subvocally reading some text, and the outputs were surprisingly good. Pair this with bone conduction, and somehow manage to only use electrodes below the face so that you can hide it with a coat or scarf, and you could pull a pretty neat magic trick.
I want those infrared contact lenses I saw in the news, that convert some infrared light to visible! Ideally I want some head-mounted set of lenses/goggle toggles to let me see various things, kinda like that scene from spy-kids and closer to another scene I have vague memories of from some movie/tv show I can't remember.
Some romantic escapades that I won't describe here.
Non-sentient mimicries of various species of animal (including squirrels and humans), so that I can get the experience of torturing one without having to actually hurt a real one. Further detail omitted.
You know the gravity defying hair that anime characters have? I'd like that please! Ideally it'd be controllable with my mind. Closest currently realizable analogs: just try really hard to style it, to give a static gravity defying one; replace my hair with synthetics that have motors to move them. This... seems maybe possible in some way?
As a kid, I wanted to hangout with friends... but in SPAAAAAAACE. That still sounds cool to me.
I, too, would like a cool house... but unlike the other examples here, imagining that detail feels like work. I think aesthetics often feel like this to me - I like the results, or imagining stuff I've already thought of, but fleshing out new ones is an effortful task of iterating to find something I want. The above ideas come readily, and don't require a bunch of effortful imaginary fiddling.
I wish I could drastically change my voice on command, like a professional voice actor. I can think of a few characters in various media with voice acting I would like to be able to do. Probably this is not worth the cost of actually training, but I would like to at least have an epic maniacal laugh.
I wish I could make my irises purple. I don't think purple contact lenses will work well enough on my brown eyes, but I plan to give it a try.
Minor telekinesis would just be really cool. I'd love to have stuff dance around me in midair, or have dozens of darts flying above me start shooting out.
I think I'd like to have some sort of spikes at the end of my fingers, ideally rock-like and black, perhaps as part of a gauntlet or other metal glove-armor thing. Then I could tap-tap-tap with them. This is somewhat like what people do with long nails, except it's very important that it's level with the fingertip, instead of the fingernail. Kinda like this picture (but various important details like material, color, and the style are all wrong):

Speaking of, there's an image in my head of the full-body version of that, like a thin rock-golem -humanoid - I'm not sure how to explain it. I'd like to be able to turn into that sometimes.
I want to see Saturn's hexagon up close! The rings too, but especially the hexagon! But only the hexagon when it has cooler colors - it apparently looked cooler in 2013 compared to 2017. I expect to be kinda underwhelmed though, most landscape-like sights tend to do that - e.g. when I saw an Aurora I was disappointed.
Someone should make an art planet. That is, an entire planet whose sole purpose is to look pretty from orbit.
I'd like to casually talk with a whole bunch of famous people, but ideally in a way that doesn't involve any social risk to me. I could, say, be disguised, and have the conversation be non-public, so that it emotionally feels like I can say whatever I want.
Ears look weird. I'm not sure what it is but anytime I pay attention to them they start bugging me. I think we should maybe get rid of them. Those robots that don't have ears know what's up.
Of the ways one could fly, I'd want a jetpack. Probably a steampunk one. Ideally it's kinda small and unassuming, and looks like it shouldn't even be able to fly - as if some idiot just added a couple gas canisters and nozzles to a mundane backpack.
I wish I could see people's organs through their skin, like how Superman's 'X-ray' vision is supposed to work.
I want to have some magic system or something that required understanding algebraic topology or other 'shapey' math to wield, in a way where mathematical facts would have implications for the way the magic works, and where incrementally improving your understanding directly translates into increased magical power. I'm still kinda sad that physical applications of that stuff are lacking.
I wish my friends were more talkative, more excitable/enthusiastic, regularly infodumped cool (by my standards) stuff to me, and engaged in interesting ways with what I say. My closest friends can typically do the last one, but not the rest.
I wish my friends were more attractive. Apparently some people aren't like this, but to me it's like having a beautiful artpiece on your wall.
I wish there was something like alcohol but that doesn't make me dumber, doesn't make my working memory go caput, and where a certain sort of perceptual effect (which is what seems to be much of the cause of drunken stumbling) could be dialed down at will.
I wish I had a small and lightweight flask attached to my clothing that could somehow still store multiple liters of water, like a decanter of endless water. That'd be so nice! I really wish water wasn't so heavy and didn't take up so much space.
I'd like a piece of quartz on a necklace, along with a little spring hammer (like in a hinge-pin remover) and an LED in hopes of using the piezoelectric effect to light it up. Even better if it can make a spark capable of setting stuff on fire. I plan on making this someday.
A couple piercings that I worry would be too painful or too inconvenient to actually get, like one on my tongue, lip, and nose.

I was originally skeptical that coming up with more ideas right now would do anything. Indeed, most of those ideas are stuff I've already thought of.

So I guess even I don't daydream enough!

I want those infrared contact lenses I saw in the news, that convert some infrared light to visible! Ideally I want some head-mounted set of lenses/goggle toggles to let me see various things, kinda like that scene from spy-kids and closer to another scene I have vague memories of from some movie/tv show I can't remember.

@AprilSR just released a VR game of distinguishing such colors. So you should try it if you have VR.
Probably this kind of effect should be in ~all VR games, it's wonderful.

https://apriiori.com/dichoptic-vr/

These are great, thank you so much!

My first two thoughts on reading this:

isn't this called "having a fantasy"?
reverse half of the advice you hear

I think 'reverse half the advice you hear' doesn't much apply to something like "here is a novel activity to try".

I barely understand what you just said.

That's better, but it's not as catchy, :(. 60% would also be better than 'half'.
The correct percentage here varies wildly person-to-person.

I think I would've said "everything in moderation" to convey the same sentiment. You can probably find something better than that.

It feels weird that to me, "half" conveys precision while "51%" is clearly an approximation whose exact value isn't important. Usually people talk like they see things the opposite way.

Edit: "Half" means 'as much as not' to me, while "51%" is a stand-in for whatever constant (or function‽) I like. This is hilarious.

Glad you found this!

I suspect I already do this thing when I am not too tired. It shows up in two forms:

Building dreams: when I am not so tired that I fall asleep quickly, I actually build and explore dreams that I enjoy. They fuse with my thoughts and so are often iterative about solving problems in my life or improving things, but just in any way possible. I also experience this after sleeping if I keep dozing. My understanding is that this is hypnogogic processing, and for me subjectively it is my ‘strongest’ thinking mode - both analytically and generatively (creatively)
Problem solving: I tend to really enjoy brainstorming without any fences or limits. I enjoy challenging myself to come up with the ‘weirdest’ or ‘most brilliant’ or ‘least likely’ or ‘most astounding’ idea. Much of that process leans on fantasy injection and then iterating back to reality. It is super fun! 🥰❤️

Anyway, not sure if I missed your point but my intuition is that I similar to John in the ‘I just never stopped imagining things’ department ❤️

Having thought about this some more. I now roughly believe:

What Gretta and John are doing is very likely (85%) basically fine or net positive for them
What Gretta and John are doing is most likely (70%) basically fine or net positive for a random person they teach

But

Some small proportion of people (0.5-15% 90% CI, weighted towards the bottom) who use this based on this post, or similar online dissemination (not in-person) will have a net negative experience because of it

And

Disclaimer 2: I know nothing about those cults I mentioned other than what is publicly available online. I don't have personal experience with them or their members.

I feel like basically any good thing can be made bad if you cultify it. This really doesn't seem like something that spirals up to many hours daily. It really does just sound like "try fantasizing".

If instead this is just called "fantasize about stuff you want", then there's less focus on unsticking you.

Makes sense to me! Also maybe talk to more people who are also weird. :)

I like the idea but I have a hard time identifying what sets it apart from just fantasizing. Maybe the focus on finding the most awesome vision, or letting go of realism?

From the blogpost:

Visioning is concretely imagining amazing, detailed fantasies, usually of the future or of a better way the world could be. The fantasies are often completely unrealistic.

It's very important for the fantasies to be concrete, detailed, and amazing; at least starting out, these should be explicit goals.

IIUC it's also very important for the fantasies to in-expectation have benefits other than rest and positive-valence; otherwise there probably wouldn't be a blogpost about them.