To chip in on that last part about the blindfolding, I can say from experience that working on hallucinations for short, very intense periods tends to be much stronger and more effective than working on hallucinations for long, relaxed periods. As in, spending a weekend doing a shit tonne of combined hours' worth of visualisation will do you more good than visualising for, say, a half or whole hour every day for a few weeks.
At least, so it has occurred to me all the times I've gone on "meditation fasts". There was a couple of weekends where I did it in late 2012. During what I think was the latter weekend, I managed to open-eyed hallucinate a tulip I had around at that point for several seconds, and all I did was pace around endlessly, use the various techniques described in my guide (such as blinking and using one's hands as a means of keeping proportions in check), and listen to a primarily theta-dominant isochronic tone on repeat. It was mindnumbingly boring whenever I'd run out of things to talk about with the Tuplas, but it was overall a very new experience to me at the time. Considering that my visualisation skills prior to that attempt were by and large locked to my mind's eye only, I'd say that was pretty well done.
I went on some more meditation fasts in the middle of 2013 and the first half of 2014, both fasts lasting several months, and as recently as December last year, I spent all month and a little bit of January this year belief implanting all day. Incidentally, I'm considering going on another meditation fast soon. Anyway, point is, if you want to make substantial progress quickly, you should do it as intensively and continuously as you can. If you want to make progress slowly, then by all means, take it slow.
Also, start doing belief implanting and, gasp, read over the stuff in my guide, instead of whining about not knowing what to do.