Im 32 and I have only just found this website. My experience

Oh my gosh! I also have tried mushrooms, mostly to see if it would help since people claim its visuals are “trippy”. I was high out of my mind, but everything stayed the same visually. Do you think that maybe psychedelics rely on taking memories of images and recombining them in order to create an external visual experience? Because maybe that’s why it doesn’t work?

I always hoped that it was like a muscle that if I worked out enough, I could eventually start seeing things. My partner nearly cried the first time I told them I don’t see movies in my head if I read a book (as they can, and really find books enjoyable for that specific reason). Unfortunately, no luck. BUT I’ve found that a lot of my life that they rely on visualizations for, I often kind of code the experiences into information that I could pull up again? But if I’m not confronted by whatever requires the information, it doesn’t really exist.

Bang on Lewis,

For the longest time I thought guided mediation was the biggest scam “imagine you are walking on a mountain, follow the river down to the ocean as the sun begins to set behind the waves” watching people “pretend” to do this always made me chuckle – until I realised that they could!

Not to mention counting sheep to help people sleep – I think its a double edged sword on the sleep front, like you there are plenty of nights where its just staring off into the nothingness but other nights its incredibly easy to doze off as when I shut my eyes everything else can just kind of switch off.

Always wondered about the psychedelics side of things and to be honest was not keen on trying it incase of a imagery overload, interesting that your self and Eva both tried with no success.

Like most things in life it has pros and cons

I love this thread of conversation.  I first learned about Aphanatasia in 2015, the BBC had done a report on it and my mind was blown.  I had spent a good deal of my 20’s involved in meditation groups and was always torn between being irritated at what other people were describing as multi-sensory experiences (because I really thought they were just full of b.s.) and worried that perhaps I had some horribly traumatic experience as a child that was causing this complete lack of that same experience.  I was SO relieved when I learned that it is generally a hereditary condition, and that my dad also has the same condition (we are both multi-sensory aphants).  However, I was also a little pissed off and feeling like I got the short end of the stick somehow.  It wasn’t fair that the rest of the world had this super power to create worlds in their minds.  But, as time has gone on and I’ve been able to really examine my experience I’ve realized that a whole lot of people spend a lot of time, money, and energy to try and quiet their minds.  In other words, they are trying to have the experience that we were lucky enough to be born with.

”I always thought the concept of “imagine this” was just metaphorical and it was just a chance for someone to build an image in your mind based on the information given. I understand that a sunrise behind some mountains should look a certain way but hell, to me that is almost like binary code I hear your command and pop it into my thoughts but I don’t paint a picture based on what you tell me.”

SPOT ON! This is a great and relatable way to describe what I imagine