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.
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.
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:
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
Some example Gretta-visions
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
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:
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
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:
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.