Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want

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 the1984 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 fulllist 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 oursurvey. 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.

Discuss