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.
The point of the post is not that we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to stop a potential “epidemic”. It’s that we should have a plan for what to do when an “epidemic” happens anyways and there is enormous amounts of political capital suddenly available to get things done.
The point is that when or if that fire hose ever opens we should have a plan to point it at the fire because we won’t have time to aim. We could very easily point the fire house in the wrong direction as has occurred often in history.