Visual Imagery In Your Daydreams

[Laila]

I met one person around here who said that their daydreams are almost always in manga (Japanese comic) format, even when they think about real people. How do the rest of you imagine the visuals in your DDs? What are the visuals?

 

Most of the time, the pictures in my mind are realistic representations of people and scenery. They seem as clear as photographs. I enjoy zooming in on my character's faces to fill in the tiniest details, like eye color, pupil size, light reflection, wet eyelashes, skin pores, pillow creases, and so on. I actually spend way more time on their facial expressions, such as intense staring, than anything else. No wonder my stories hardly get anywhere! =P Everything also moves very lifelike, ranging from subtle eye movements and breaths fading into cold air to individual strands of hair blowing in the wind.

 

This might be common, but when I think about my characters living in an older time period, they're not in color anymore. More like sepia tone. And sometimes for fun, I cartoonify my characters, being into anime and all that. xD

 

Now and then, I go through a brief phase where I can't "see" their faces...like they're just blocked. It usually happens after I watch an engrossing movie or too much TV, and it's so annoying that I almost wrote a blog post about my suffering one night lol. My concentration returns to normal only after I wake up the next day.

[Ana Suau]

Hello! You know what? I just spent a while writing my answer to this thread, but thankfully before adding the reply I thought of something, and thank goodness I did because I would have felt very silly.

The basic information of my reply was that my daydreams are visually blurry, always, but then I thought, what if that's the normal thing and I'm here thinking most people can daydream with a clear view of their worlds and characters... so first I'd like to check if the blurriness is the usual thing, certainly sounds to me like it is, because I'm not sure most people's brain is designed to see things (thoughts, memories, dreams, etc) as clear as pictures inside the head.

So, I'm really confused right now (I feel like Brittany from Glee), anyone knows something about it?

 

P.S. Sorry if my question is out of topic, seriously, right now I can't even tell.

[Laila]

@Ana: No worries, your question is relevant! xD

 

Sure, imagining is not exactly the same as seeing it for real, since your eyes aren't perceiving anything. It takes effort and hard concentration. But it's not like my mental images have a Gaussian blur effect, either. I mean, I can imagine objects blurring in and out of focus, and I tend to imagine them in their clearest form with intricate detail. It almost seems like they're right in front of me, but they're not at the same time. Ya'know? D:

 

Granted, objects get blurry in the background or disappear altogether when I'm selectively attending to my character's faces, which seem very clear in contrast. But if I can't concentrate, then that really sucks! Like I said, after I watch a good movie, my character's faces are wiped clean off. No eyes or anything, just a head. Kinda spooky. All I can imagine are the actor's faces from the movie hahaha.

 

Sorry, I'm horrible at describing this, lol. I think I sounded stupid. D:

[J Noland]

Now that you guys are mentioning it, maybe my dds are blurry too. Like the main characters and what they are doing is clear (I think, I'll have to pay more attention to that detail) but the background may be blurry but I've never noticed before. Some characters that I haven't decided on a face for are either just from the back of their heads or they are constantly changing from one face to another until one locks into my brain. I hope that made sense to someone.

[Laila]

Gyah, these thoughts about blurriness are starting to mess with my head now. But I totally understand what you're saying, J Noland. When I imagine strangers walking around, for instance, I don't bother filling in their faces. Like when a cartoon animator is too lazy to animate individual people surrounding the main character, they look like the same mindless blob. Whenever I pull a stranger out of the crowd, I change their appearance until one just clicks. Same thing for a supporting character, even. My main character's best friend still doesn't have a definite face, which might slightly change a few times in one scene, or I pick a view where I can't see it. Only my main chars have clear faces, or anyone based off a celebrity. So... I still wanna go with my answer. The question is, how clear is clear? It's all so subjective. xD

[Ana Suau]

Hello again! Well, now that I don't feel so silly about my doubt thanks to you guys, I'll post my original reply after all, even though now it'll make me look lazy for not re-writing it like it was my second reply and not the 1st to this topic, so excuse me for that, I should have posted this reply first and THEN, my doubt... but well, if all problems in life were that bad... Anyway, there goes my 2 cents:

 

"Hello! Just wanted to state how fascinating I found to find out (sorry for the redundancy) how some of you daydream, visually. I hadn't even thought about until now, which surprises me because I have thought about the different ways people dream (while sleeping).

Anyway, my daydreams are not so elaborated visually, to be sincere, like in my sleeping dreams, everything is blurry (although I daydream in color, while I realized recently that most of my sleep dreams are blurry and in black and white, oddly).

Specially blurry in both are people's faces, even my alter ego's, even when I try to purposely focus on one character's face and see it clearly, I hardly can, it's like my mind doesn't know how to fill the slots where the eyes and other features are and just gets confused without knowing what I'm asking it to do (to show me the full face), unless the character's physical appearance is based on a real actor/actress/singer, then I can see their faces a little better, but still a little blurry.

 

Now that I think about it, I guess maybe the fact that I'm very shy and hardly look at people's faces in real life for more than a second (even the few people I'm comfortable with) has something to do, because of that, I obviously recognize people when I see them, but if I can't see them in a picture or in real time, most of the times their faces are also blurry in my head.

 

My point was, that my daydreams are "realistic" (well feels more like a movie o a tv show filmed accordingly) when it comes to composition and visuals, no fancy close-ups, or comic o Manga dynamism, but they are blurry and the "camera" is quite static, I guess because in the end what really matters to me when I daydreams are the dialogues and monologues, so even if I have different basic scenarios (apartment, house, 19th palace or manor, workplace, etc, depending on the world I'm in), they are not very detailed. So I guess my daydreams are quite boring visually"

[Riley]

I also visualize everything realistic I never even thought about dreaming in cartoon it sure sounds interesting but I don't think I ever will :)

Now where I got to read everything that was written with the zooming in and all that I realized  that I color coordinate the couples in my fantasy's obsessively to the dot.

[1nmiirc70dne4]

in my 'world' it always looks real. like reality. they do have alot of detail but sometimes ill suddenly add more detail like you described. and about the thing where there faces are blocked...ive never had that but i have had it where say someone was going swimming abd they where talking there shoes off. sometimes the shoes WONT come off. theyll just stay there. i have this mond thing where ill put a giant imaginary rock on the shoes so they wont go flying back onto there owner. ive also had it a coupe of times where my charcter will look like some Movie star or something and it takes a while to change them back to there original look and figure. i also had it recenlty where the main thing in my daydreams i was focousing on kept changing sizes every second. all these things are really ANNOYING.

[Laila]

Haha! Objects also get stuck to my characters. I actually tried the rock thing, but I prefer to imagine a laser beam destroying the object. Oh that poor little water bottle... It never did anything wrong... *cry* Similarly, my characters won't always move the way I want them to. It's like my mind is stuck doing the opposite of what I want. So weird and annoying indeed! xD

 

Emily Van Dort said:

in my 'world' it always looks real. like reality. they do have alot of detail but sometimes ill suddenly add more detail like you described. and about the thing where there faces are blocked...ive never had that but i have had it where say someone was going swimming abd they where talking there shoes off. sometimes the shoes WONT come off. theyll just stay there. i have this mond thing where ill put a giant imaginary rock on the shoes so they wont go flying back onto there owner. ive also had it a coupe of times where my charcter will look like some Movie star or something and it takes a while to change them back to there original look and figure. i also had it recenlty where the main thing in my daydreams i was focousing on kept changing sizes every second. all these things are really ANNOYING.

[Sunshine]

When i visualize, if it is based off a anime or cartoon they look like what ever the cartoon looks like. If i am not daydreaming about a show i will imagine things in real life form. I see in color and i watch it like a movie and sometimes out of my own eyes but not very often.

[Palejade]

Same for me. They are always in anime format, even when im basing it on a show or movie with real people. I used to be incredibly into manga when I first started dreaming, so all my central characters are in that format. Also, i used to watch a lot of cartoons as a little kid so before my daydreams were strongly MD they would have been about those, so still in that format. 

I dont read much of it anymore, and i haven't watched any cartoons in a long while but in my head thats the natural way for it to be, i guess. Instead of altering my characters to the  new story, i put the story in anime format.