by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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The following guides are intended to provide you further assistance in getting more value from practice of Image Streaming, especially more practice in accurately getting value from the practical side of Image Streaming, such as key understandings in problem-solving, figuring out answers to questions, discovering key principles and inventions and innovations, and learning.
Your main initial understanding of and skill in Image Streaming will come from its learning and practice provided you in Welcome to Image Streaming and Image Streaming, and in our most authoritative publication on this remarkable phenomenon, Charles Roman’s book Win Wenger’s Image Streaming.
Run the checklist below on what you are doing to make certain that you get the benefits of actual Image Streaming.
The following topics are addressed here, each in its own special section below:
- Was what you did in fact Image Streaming?
- How to get greater accuracy in your Image Stream
- Ways to decipher and understand your images, including your dreams
- Some great follow-up questions
- Summary of steps for two procedures: Quick Question/Answer and High Thinktank
- Benefit from Image Streaming and from other related experiential processes and CPS methods
- Measuring your own progress
Was What You Did Image Streaming?
The Problem: Many people have read the basic instructions how to Image Stream, many different ways. Some, for one reason or another, skipped one provision or another which is crucial to the effects associated with Image Streaming, and then were classically disappointed that “Image Streaming” wasn’t doing wonderful things for them.
Suggested Solution: Run the following checklist on your own just-experienced session of Image Streaming to make sure you are getting all the factors which are likeliest to bring you the full benefits.
- I described aloud, to a live and meaningful listener or at least to an audio recorder with the idea that someone would later hear that recording. Note: it is that describing aloud an ongoing perception to an audience which most develops that perception, and prevents lazy short-cuts, and strengthens both what you are saying and what and how you are hearing what you are saying, in the key development loop.
- I described in sensory detail, more than or rather than explaining what it was I was seeing or imagining, using the sensory language of the sensory-associative majority of the brain which we consult in Image Streaming, to strengthen conscious contact with that greater brain.
- I described rapidly and mostly did not edit what I was saying.
- I described mostly while I was observing, what I was observing.
- Whatever method or back-ups (24 alternative methods for getting started the flow of images and/or impressions) I used to get started, I gave my attention and description to images or impressions as they were happening, seeking to notice them as they came along rather than consciously directing them.
- I looked-and-described first, only afterward am I trying to figure out what the images or impressions actually mean.
- After gathering and detailing my images and impressions, I do usually try to figure out what they mean. Going back and forth between those images and their possible meanings, strengthens the pathways of contact that were laid down across your brain when first noticing and describing aloud those images.
- I usually involve more than one sense in these Image Streaming experiences, as a way of strengthening conscious contact with the greater part of my brain.
Noticing, picking up on, and describing in detail and into full focus of conscious awareness ANY kind of initially subtle impression or sensory imagery will bring you some of the benefits associated with Image Streaming. Vision, however, contains more information “per square unit of attention” than does any other sense and should be included whenever possible.
How to get greater accuracy in your Image Stream
The Problem: The loud verbal-focused part of the brain thinks it knows better. Part of the region of the brain we seek to consult, wants to please the conscious you. This twin effect can and sometimes does lead our answers astray.
Solutions:
- Practice describing things accurately as possible, both inner impressions and sensory detail of external objects and situations.
- To the extent possible, go with your first impression(s), especially if they veer from the story line you are on.
- Focus your intention as best you can, each time you go in, to get beneficial, real, useful and accurate understandings from your images, on this specific occasion, and generally.
- Aim to be surprised, and let yourself be surprised, especially in answers to specific questions and problems if you pose one of these going in.
- Track at least some of your experiences in a recording form which encourages further qualitative development but does not critically require it—for example, something like the experience-record form given out here.
- Describe more rapidly than you can stop to think how to edit what you’re saying. On the same principle, use suddenness to go for first impressions.
- High Thinktank method, concealing from conscious knowledge what or which question it is that’s being asked until you’ve looked at what’s being shown you to be the answer by the more sensitive regions of your brain and mind.
Ways to decipher and understand your images, including your dreams
The Problem: The conscious verbal focus part of the brain, and the sensory-image-associating greater part of the brain we’re seeking to consult, work with and speak different languages. Everyone’s accumulated life experiences encode differently, there appears to be no reliable universal Rosetta Stone for translation.
Solutions:
- First describe, as freely as possible, in sensory detail, and then start working out what the images mean. It’s like you have two feet of the mind—one for observing, one to make sense of what you’ve observed; it’s best to move each foot freely in its turn.
- Get some experience in working with metaphors, which are the interface between understanding by sensory-associations and understanding by conceptual associations. Metaphors bridge between these two languages by making themselves understood in both. Practice in seeking to decipher the meaning of your images is a good way to gain experience in working with metaphor.
- Describe the ongoing images in as rich sensory detail as you can. Sometimes very subtle aspects will be the main key, aspects easily missed with a sparse description.
- Each time you debrief a different way or to a different medium—say, to a different partner or to a different way of recording—on the same experience, you notice much detail that you didn’t report before, some of it often very important to your answer or message. More than 2-3 debriefings on the same image experience, however, in terms of time and effort seems less practical than to switch to some of the other means of decoding.
- Feature-questioning, or some other form of limited intervention or interaction with your ongoing imagery experience. Limited because you want to find out what the greater, sensory-based part of your brain IS saying to you rather than to make it say to you what you expect it to say. How that imagery changes in response to that intervention, often clues you in as to what that imagery message or answer was all about. (Feature Questioning: find some feature of the current set of images which most attracts your attention, establish contact with it, ask it “Why are you here in the context of this message (or answer) for me?”—and notice and report the changes that happen in your imagery experience as a result of your asking that question.)
- Listing features, listing associations that you have with each feature: List the component elements and factors of a set of images, and at least some of their sensory describable features, their adjectives so to speak. With each in turn, start describing the multiple and varied associations you have with each feature, and talking about what that might have meant. If need be, identify in turn with different images within the stream or dream, and relate the action of that stream or dream from the viewpoint and standpoint of each particular image.
- Triangulation, a/k/a “Inductive Inference.” Get three different imagery experiences aligned on the same message or same answer to a given problem or question, but each with entirely different images. What’s the same when everything else is different, usually points to the main message or answer and everything else falls into place around that. Important: describe each set of images in enough detail that you won’t miss the subtle aspect or aspects which are in fact the common factor. This interpretative method has thus far worked out to be our best and mainstay. “Inductive Inference” is detailed in the middle of page 1 here.
- “Joking Analyst” — “Many a truth is spoken in jest.” You see more possibilities when you are having fun with something than when you are being very careful and trying hard to be right. Joking Analyst needs to be done with a small group to bring out the humor. Take and interpret only your own experiences but pretend that they are the experiences of one of your clients instead, that you are trying to figure out. Pretend that you are Siggy Freud or Milty Erickson or some other profound student of human symbology and metaphor. As Siggy, speculate to your “professional colleagues” there in that small group as to possible meanings, but—you score more for being funny than for being right. Let fly and see what else surfaces for you.
- Ask follow-up questions about what you understand of your message or answer, and see what further images you get back in answer.
Some great follow-up questions
The Problem: Consulting the part of the brain which likes to deal with the Big Picture and with great general understandings, it is very easy to leave an issue in generalities and not get the specifics needed to move forward.
Solution: Asking your own faculties such follow-up questions as:
- How can I tell or make sure that I’m on the right track in my understanding of this (message or) answer?
- What’s the best question for me to ask now in this context, and what is it’s best answer?
- What’s the most important further thing for me to know or to pay attention to at this point?
- What’s the specific first step toward my implementing this understanding?
- What should I be most alert for or attentively concerned about in my efforts to implement this understood answer?
- What’s the highest priority for my attention and action at this time?
Devise your own special follow-up questions to ask your own faculties, and then see what they show you in answer.
Summary of Steps for Two Procedures:
QQA and High Thinktank
Quick Question/Answer (QQA) — in small groups of 3 to 6 members
- Whoever’s turn it is to present a question, presents that question. The presenter signifies the end of the question with a nod or fingersnap or light tap of table, cueing everyone in that small group to instantly go with their first impression of the answer.
- On that signal, all the members instantly look and feel inside themselves for their very first impression of what the answer is, and give that silently as much attention as they can for 15-30 seconds. Then they write on notepad a brief summary description in sensory detail, or list 7 to 12 adjectives describing what they have found in that image or impression. (We trust pictures better than words: if a response comes in words, note that word or words but go on then to describe sensory detail of whatever it is that you associate with that word.)
- Members each, in turn, describe in sensory detail to the group the impressions or images they got in answer to the question asked. Everyone keeps notes on each experience, the better to notice and refer to similarities among the different descriptions. Orient first to the sensory detail, then search more for what’s the same when everything else is different. The person who presented the question originally should keep the most detailed notes.
- Everyone searches their own and everyone else’s experiences for those similarities.
- The person who asked the question is the one who gets to interpret, though members may very judiciously ask questions which might help highlight possible meanings in the consciousness of the asker without giving them away.
- Follow-up questions are optional, depending upon the objectives of participants in the group.
Group High Thinktank Method
The problem is how to present a question such that our loud left verbal conscious brain won’t interpose its guesses and assumptions between you and the subtler, but more comprehensively accurate, responses of your greater, sensory-associating part of your brain. Our most effective method for this to date is to conceal the question from consciousness of the people who are to answer it, though with enough subliminal cue and inference or other process around to let one’s more sensitive faculties answer via image or impression.
The objective is not to “psyche” what the question is, just to look at and detail what the image or impression is that one’s greater brain is offering in answer to whatever question is being presented. Just look in at that answer and read it off; don’t worry about or speculate about what the question is until afterward.
Really major, really important questions and problems of general concern are where this method is at its best advantage, allowing people to generate fresh perceptions and insights on matters they have already previously thought about and come either to premature conclusions or to an impasse.
- The participants whose turn it is to present a question, present that question silently. Loudly in their mind, but objectively silently, with no one else in the group yet getting to consciously see or know what question is being asked. The person presenting the question signifies the end of the question-asking with a nod or a snap of the fingers, cueing the others in that small group to go with their first impressions of the answer.
- On that signal, all look and feel inside themselves for their very first impression of what the answer is, and give that silently as much attention as they can for 15-30 seconds. Then they write on notepad a brief summary description in sensory detail, or list 7 to 12 adjectives describing what they have found in that image or impression. We trust pictures better than words: if a response comes in words, note that word or words but go on then to describe sensory detail of whatever it is that you associate with that word.
- Members, each in turn, describe in sensory detail to the group the impressions or images they got in answer to the question asked. Everyone keeps notes on each experience, the better to notice and refer to similarities among the different descriptions. Orient first to the sensory detail, then search more for what’s the same when everything else is different. The person who presented the question originally should keep the most detailed notes.
- Everyone searches their own and everyone else’s experiences for those similarities.
- Reveal the question so that everyone now knows it consciously. Everyone now pitches in on finding how those similarities or common elements somehow in fact answer the question that had been asked.
- Follow-up questions are optional, depending upon the objectives of participants in the group, and how important was the question.
An overall general benefit from Image Streaming and other such methods
Behavior’s main law, The Law of Effect:
You get more of what you reinforce.
When you repeat or relay or describe a perception or piece of information, you reinforce it, both in memory and in making it more available to other responses. However, if what you are relaying or responding to is your own, first-hand perception, further and crucial benefits accrue which are even more important:
- Making some sort of concrete response such as describing, to your own, first-hand awareness, reinforces also the behavior and trait of being aware! And:
- If some of these first-hand awarenesses are initially subtle for you, as is usually the case, you are reinforcing your ability to handle subtle issues and matters—and that is one definition of “intelligence.” By that definition (and by some others), practice of such activities, such as Image Streaming, improves your very intelligence.
Measuring your own progress
Get some sense of where you are in your development. That knowledge will give you some traction. There are no “ought-to’s” in this listing, just observations. Most people don’t immediately get photographic detail and clarity, though that often comes with practice. Even well-practiced Image Streamers will often get just quick impressions, just enough to answer a question if they are in a hurry. So the phenomena observed below will vary both toward and away from clear pictures over time.
If you want clear pictures, however, scoring yourself on these points from one Image Streaming session to the next will serve as an ongoing reminder and reinforcer that somewhere along the way, you’d like clarity or more clarity in the regard cited.
You can print out this form for easy use, and/or into a file in your computer to keep track of your experiences. In the latter instance, you can head each entry with a title and date, and also use key words, so that your computer’s search functions will help you find your way to retrieve data as your important information accumulates and piles up.
With no “ought-to’s,” just observations, rate these points of your experience 0 (none) to 5 (wow!):
- Immediate images without coaxing
- Visual detail
- Color
- Clarity
- Intensity
- Saw movement
- In 3-D
- Heard sounds in the experience
- Noticed/experienced smells
- Noticed/experienced tastes
- Encountered some beauty
- Touched or felt textures
- Could feel pressures
- Felt warmth &/or coolness
- Could feel movement
- Atmospheric or emotional “feel”
- A “knowing” or “knowingness”
- Other senses (describe)
- Exaltation or other special feeling
- Found answer or meaning
- Answer or meaning clear for you
- Answer or meaning came easily for you
- Answer or meaning important
- Your confidence in answer or meaning
- You verified answer or meaning
- Calm clarity you felt after session
Option: In your printout, allow yourself enough space here to summarize:
The experience, if you’d like to, in 2-3 sentences. What you interpreted the message or answer to be. By what means, if any, you arrived at that interpretation. Any special observation not addressed above.