Aphantasia and dreaming

Hi Billy, welcome to the community! I do experience visual, multi-sensory dreams however there are plenty who dream like yourself. Do you experience your dreams spatially? Do you feel movement or sensation in your dreams? Or are they purely conceptual?

There are a few studies listed in our Research Index if you care to check them out. Also, there is a previous discussion about dreams that has had a lot of engagement.  I figured you may enjoy jumping in that conversation!

Yes, very much so. I find more often than not, however, that I simply do not remember my dreams. When I do, however, the best explanation for my personal experience that I have been able to find the words for, is that for me, dreaming is almost like reading a campfire story, to myself. Absolutely no visuals, but a story is played out nonetheless. If that makes sense? 🙂

Billy – I’m the same as you. I first discovered I had aphantasia in 2007. Because aphantasia wasn’t named until 2015, I wanted in 2007 a way to find other people on the internet who had aphantasia. After a few false starts trying other phrases, I found some by googling  “dream without pictures”. All the ones I found that way in 2007 seemed to me to have successful interesting lives. A good example is a woman named Renee Fuller in California who invented the ball stick bird method of teaching reading (you can google it). Due to her aphantasia, she had trouble learning to read as a child so she invented that method which reduced the amount of dyslexia diagnoses (misdiagnoses?) in the world. 

I only have images in my dreams when taking certain medications. The first few times it happened I mistook the dream for reality because I’d NEVER had imagery in dreams before.  In general, my dreams are more like audiobooks. I’m hearing the “story” in sentences, like listening to a book about myself as the main character (usually written in first person present tense, but not always)