Sometimes there is an element of precognition (the ability to foresee the future) in visualization. The image the visualizer conjures up may not be from his imagination, as he thinks; it may be a glimpse of an actual physical environment or situation he will experience at some point in the future.
Harold Sherman, who frequently writes on the psychic power of visualization, recounts the experience of a Pennsylvania couple of his acquaintance. Mr. and Mrs. B. had lived in a large city for many years but had always wanted to move to the country. After reading one of Sherman’s books on imaging, Mrs. B. decided to apply the technique in a very specific way.
She would look out her kitchen window onto the city scene outside and declare, "The apartment houses over there are really the Blue Mountains. I will look out over the Blue Mountains while I’m doing my dishes."
She went on to describe more of the environment in which they would be living once they moved to the country.
Our house will sit back off the road … It will be on a small hill or mound … and the street down there will be an old dirt road," she told her husband. She pointed to the spot where a brook would be and she went on to tell what the other buildings on the property would look like.
Every day I visualized, every day I looked at the ‘mountains’ as I did my dishes," she wrote to Sherman. "Every day I passed my ‘brook’; every day, coming home from work on the busy street, I was really walking up my ‘road’ …
My husband and I pictured our home so vividly that it is EXACTLY what we got!
They ended up living in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. From her kitchen Mrs. B. saw in reality the Blue Mountains just as she had "seen" them in her imagination. The brook, the house on the hill, the other buildings were all as she had "imagined."
Every evening I take my stroll around the beautiful valley; down the old dirt road. In the city I had visualized the trip to the store in the evenings as I am doing now.
Parapsychologists know that precognitive visions typically appear spontaneously from the unconscious or manifest in dreams. The kind of experience Mrs. B. recounts is unusual, although certainly not unheard of. The psychic forces that can be unleashed in visualization often work in a surprising and astonishing fashion.