Imagination Beyond Mental Images

Aphantasia: Before I Discovered Its Name

At the age of eight, I swapped a handful of Penny Arrows (an old English treat) for a book that promised a better memory.

It instructed me to create bright mental pictures and walk through them in my imagination. I followed the method exactly–except for the part where the pictures were supposed to appear. I assumed the language was metaphorical. Surely, others didn’t actually see things..

More than forty years later, in a quiet conversation with my now late wife, I discovered that most people really can see those images. That was the moment my childhood experience stopped being typical and acquired a name—aphantasia.

Many people with aphantasia describe a similar delay between that first quiet realization—I don’t seem to be doing what the instructions are asking—and the later discovery that other people are having a fundamentally different internal experience. From the inside, nothing feels absent. Memory works. Reading works. Imagination works. It is only when someone says, “No, I can actually see it,” that the metaphor collapses and the difference becomes visible.

The Language of Imagery

The assumption that imagination is primarily visual is deeply woven into everyday language. So much so that the concept has become almost invisible:

We are asked to picture the future, to replay memories, to hold an image in the mind.

Relaxation exercises and guided hypnosis sessions begin by inviting us to “see” a beach or a candle flame.

Memory strategies promise improvement if we can only make our inner images more vivid.

For those of us without mental imagery, rather than literal—it’s simply figurative. We understand the instructions, translate them into something that works for us, and move on, unaware that others are following them in an entirely different way.

Haiku: A Form I Shouldn’t Have Been Able to Write

This was the context in which I first encountered haiku—a form almost universally described as a way of capturing a scene; a snapshot in words. The advice given to beginners seemed to depend on the very faculty I did not possess: observe, recall, and render the image. By all reasonable assumptions, for someone with aphantasia, it should have been a frustrating exercise in approximation.

Instead, something unexpected happened. I found that I could write haiku in the same way I had always remembered and understood the world—through attention, through relationship, through the timing of perception—and nothing felt as though it were missing.

Attention Instead of Pictures

When a haiku begins for me, it does not start with a mental picture. It starts with a shift in attention. Something aligns for a moment—a sound against a background of silence, a change in temperature, the way two perceptions occur at once and seem to belong together.

There is no internal scene to consult, no image to refine. The experience is already complete in the present, and the words arrive as a way of registering the relationship between its parts.

overpass — colt wandering to smell the daffodils

For a long time, I assumed I was compensating for something—converting an image-based process into a verbal one.

But the more I wrote, the clearer it became that there was nothing for which to compensate. The poems were not incomplete. Readers did not experience them as lacking in imagery. If anything, the absence of an internal screen seemed to keep the attention anchored in what was actually present: sound, space, contact, time passing.

What I had taken to be a limitation was simply a different starting point.

Remembering Without Replaying

The same pattern appears for me in memory. When I recall an event, I do not re-enter it visually. I know where I was. I know what happened. I know how it felt. Certain details remain—a phrase that was spoken, the weight of an object in my hand, the quality of the light as a fact rather than a picture. The memory is relational and conceptual rather than sensory.

When I write haiku, I depend on exactly this kind of recall; not the reconstruction of a scene, but the recognition of what made a moment meaningful.

falling leaves — fifth rubber band around the letters my mum had kept

Not a Picture but an Event

Without an internal field of images, attention settles elsewhere. It moves outward rather than inward. The world is not something I reconstruct in my mind but something I meet directly, in real time:

the cadence of footsteps approaching from behind

the sudden coolness when a cloud passes over the sun

the way a conversation shifts when a single word is left unsaid

Experience is not mediated through an inner picture but registered as a pattern of relationships—between sounds, between moments, between myself and what is present. Haiku did not require me to overcome the absence of imagery. It depended on exactly this kind of noticing.

This led to a second realization: the common description of haiku as a visual snapshot is, at best, incomplete. A haiku is not a picture but an event—a moment in which two perceptions touch and create a change in awareness. That change can be carried by a sound, a movement of air, a contrast in temperature, or a pause in speech.

The reader does not need to see what the poet saw. The poem works by recreating the relationship, not by reproducing the image.

Entering the Structure

For those of us with aphantasia, this has wider implications.

We are often told, implicitly or explicitly, that creativity depends on visualization—that to imagine is to see. Yet many forms of art do not begin with images at all. They begin with structure, with language, with rhythm, with systems, with the recognition that two things belong together.

The absence of mental imagery does not remove us from the creative process. Rather, it places us in a different relationship to it, one that is often more immediate and less filtered through rehearsal.

The same is true of reading. I do not project a film of the novel into my mind. Instead, I experience a shifting network of meanings and emotional tones. Places exist as known environments rather than as internally viewed landscapes; characters are defined by what they do and say rather than by a visible face.

Nothing about this feels thin or incomplete. If anything, it allows the language itself to remain in the foreground.

bell cricket — the sound of fog in the valley

Haiku, with its reliance on suggestion and participation, mirrors this process perfectly. The poem does not supply an image to be viewed but a structure to be entered.

Appreciating What Was Always There

When I think back to the eight-year-old version of me, sitting with that memory manual, trying to follow instructions that seemed perfectly clear and yet produced no images, I no longer see a failure of method or imagination. I see a child already working in the only way he could: translating visual language into patterns of meaning, sequence, and relationship.

Nothing was missing from the experience itself. What was missing was the vocabulary to describe it. The discovery of aphantasia, forty years later, did not give me a new ability. It gave me a way of understanding the one I had always had.

Many people with aphantasia seem to reach this point of recognition and begin to re-evaluate earlier assumptions about memory, imagination, and creativity. Experiences that once felt like workarounds turn out to have been primary modes of thought all along. The strategies we developed—attending to structure, language, and the way moments connect—are not substitutes for imagery but complete cognitive styles in their own right.

In forms such as haiku, which depend on attention and relationship rather than description, those styles are not a disadvantage. They are a natural fit.

A Different Imagination

These questions—what it means to write without images, how memory functions when it is not visual, why a form so often described as pictorial can arise from a non-visual mind—became the starting point for my book Haiku Without a Mind’s Eye, which grew out of the same questions. The book is an extended exploration of the same realization that began with that childhood encounter with a mnemonic system: absence of mental imagery does not place us outside the imaginative world. It places us in it differently.

To live without a mind’s eye is not to live without imagination. It is to experience imagination as something that happens in time rather than on a screen, in relationships rather than in pictures, and in the meeting between attention and the present moment. For me, haiku became the place where this was most clearly visible—not because it gave me images, but because it showed me that I had never needed them.

“Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine.” — Matsuo Bashō

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Barbara Snapp•recently•edited

I, too, discovered haiku before I realized I had complete aphantasia. I wrote haiku when I took some painting classes for the first time. Looking at a scene I wanted to paint, I would use haiku to "speak" the feeling/image I wanted to get across (and photographs helped!). Later, when teaching a course on "Time, SPace, and Other Big Ideas" to people my age (60's and older), I would write haiku to crystallize the essence of an idea I wanted to get across to my course participants. So now I have 150 haiku on the nature of the universe - and have used some of my art to accompany them. I love haiku for its succinct, to-the-point messaging. haiku open minds evoking thoughts, scenes, events whether seen or not

Mark Farrar•recently•edited

I love that, Barbara! If you haven't already tried it, I suspect that haiga would be right up your street.

Alice Grebanier•recently•edited

I too am aphantasic in multiple senses. Nevertheless, I share Mark Farrar's experience that "from the inside, nothing feels absent." I recognize that different people react differently to the discovery that they are aphantasic. For many it is very disturbing and brings a sense of loss and missing out. That has never been true for me. Actually, for me, the sense of absence comes on those rare occasions when I actually make the effort to create a mental visual image. The effort wipes out my ordinary mental processes, the imageless imagery and the soundless sounds. Best to let my mind work the way it seems to be built to work. There is no reason to expect that the experience of aphantasia will be the same for different people. But I think it is very helpful to have articles like these to reference that present more positive views. Perhaps something here will resonate with someone who has newly discovered that they too are aphantasic and feel a bit overwhelmed by the realization. Even if the specifics do not exactly apply to someone else's mind, it may open a door to exploring how one's own aphantasic mind works.

Alice, thank you for your comment. For the most part, I am with you - I never felt something was absent, other than two specific examples that spring to mind: 1. When I first got involved in mnemonics, when I was eight, I thought about how much easier it would be if I could create mental images. Of course, at that age, I didn't put it in those exact words. 2. Before my girlfriend and I moved in together a few years ago, we would have long video chats every day. When we ended the chat, and her face disappeared from my screen, it made me so sad, lonely, and frustrated that I couldn't conjure up her image in my mind