aphantasia

[sophia_sol]

I'm aphantasic - I do not and cannot create pictures in my mind's eye. My mind does not have an eye. But there have been just a few times very recently where in the first moments upon waking in the morning, there's an image in my mind and I feel like I can SEE it. Like, see it see it! As if I were looking at it with my eyes! It always vanishes within a few moments, but my god, is that a glimpse into what it's like to NOT be aphantasic??

Now, though, I'm wondering which of several things is true:

1. Am I weirdly suddenly able to access a tiny amount of picturing things, out of nowhere?

Or

2. Is the dreamy confusion of waking up making me *feel* like I'm picturing things but not *actually* picturing things? It lasts so briefly that I actually can't be sure!

Or

3. Have I always genuinely able to picture things in my sleep, but not awake, but because I only conscsiously experience dreams through the medium of remembering them, I've never been able to tell that - and a change in recent sleeping habits means I have been holding on to a snatch of a dream just long enough to get the sense of it with my waking mind?

Or something else????

Anyway these brief snatches of mind-pictures have been a baffling thing to experience, as something I've never previously been able to do in my life ever, and all of a sudden I'm a little more of a true believer that other people DO do this thing all the time!

It always seemed so fake to me before. So made up. How could a person PICTURE things?! That's just a metaphor, surely! We're using words about images to describe the experience of thinking about a thing, because the actual experience of thinking is so unlike anything in the physical world that there are no words to describe it! Right? Right????

I guess for lots of people, they literally are creating pictures in their head with their brains, all the time.

WILD.

Now I really wish I had a better way to explain what my experience of thinking is like, tbh. Because all I have is metaphor, to translate it into words! But those metaphors are apparently concrete factual experiences to other people, so I won't be successfully communicating!

This is similar to my experience with words, btw. I *can* think in words, more than I can with pictures, but that's me deliberately creating the words and sentences. I'm translating my thoughts into words with conscious effort.

My thoughts aren't words. My thoughts aren't pictures. My thoughts are thoughts!

How are so many people's thoughts NOT just thoughts!

Comments

[pauraque]

Huh, I never thought about whether aphantasic people see in their dreams! I guess it makes sense that if you did you wouldn't necessarily know, because when you remember them while awake it's just a memory, and if I understand aphantasia correctly your memories have no visual component.

I would say I think in a combination of words, images, and abstract thoughts. It depends on what I'm thinking about and how I'm mentally approaching it.

[china_shop]

I'm aphantasic too, and this is such a great description of what it's like! Kudos! (And yeah, I'm pretty sure I sometimes dream in pictures, because I'll be like "There was an orange cat" and I have a vague shadowy recollection of an orange circle, but kind of a knowing that I saw it?)

[chestnut_pod]

It's true… I'll read a book, and if it's any good, I will retain strong visual memories of it which will last far beyond any recollection of the exact words or even the actual plot.

[genarti]

I wouldn't say all the time, for me. My brain isn't generally full of images. (I would describe my mental image of the inside of my head as a big empty space, not empty like a physical space you can see but empty like the absence of sound or image or anything, fuzzing out at the edges of my skull into Stuff That's Not Me. I haven't verbalized this before, but it occurred to me to mention given the subject, because I do think it's pretty consistently what it feels like as a default.) But if I'm trying to picture something, for any reason, I can. I mean, with varying levels of detail and accuracy vs vagueness depending on what we're talking about, but from talking to other friends about "what do you see if you consciously try to picture an apple" etc, I think I'm an outlier on the precise detail end of things.

My thoughts aren't exactly words, but they... like... shift back and forth between being words and not words a lot. I don't have a constant inner monologue, but I do think in words a lot. But not exclusively, for sure.