For beginning to visualize it is always useful to have the recording of a drum beat or a sound that is repetitive. Before sleep, relax in darkness, or with a blindfold, and visualize passing through a long tunnel towards a light that is visible at the other end. Use the insistent drumbeat to propel through the tunnel at greater and greater speeds. As you enter the luminous haze you can call upon an ally, or guide, to assist in the exploration of the realm entered. This guide might be in the form of a mythic creature, an animal or a spirit.
Take your time waiting for the ally to appear and do not be surprised at its form. Just allow it to take shape in your mind and do not be fearful if it appears in a frightening guise. (Many shamans claim that the more ferocious the ally or the totem animal, the greater will be your vision quest.) Allow the imagined event to unfold, and when you feel it is complete, make a point of bidding the ally farewell, thanking it for taking you into the realm and requesting it to join you in sleep whenever it wishes to teach or guide you again.
Return along the tunnel and await sleep, knowing with absolute certainty that this sequence will be continued in a dream; that you will once again enact the sequence, but that this time, the moment you see the ally, you will immediately awaken within the dream.
If, later in the night, you manage to invoke a lucid dream, use exactly the same waking procedure in the dream. The power and reality will be of a radically different dimension from the earlier guided visualization when awake. So be alert and prepared, when a very real totem animal or ally appears, not to be any more fearful than when you were guiding a daydream.
Avoid trying to control the dream past the point of meeting your guide; just follow the dream as attentively as you can, remaining a witness who remembers it is all a dream and yet who can marvel at the details and unexpected turn of events.
~ from Maat's Book of Shadows