My dream recall has always been almost absent, I had more when I was younger but they were almost never visual in nature, I can count the number of visual dreams I remember on one hand, maybe two and that’s over the course of over 40 years.
My normal dream remembrance is only vague impressions of feeling or tiny fragments of scenes with no purpose, and even then that’s only ever few months. That vast majority of the time I go to sleep it’s light’s out, light’s on, that’s it nothing else.
After waking I have no recollection of any images but the feeling of remembering having seen something is very distinct in my mind and remains to this day as I can still recall these dreams even after 40 years with I think a fair degree of accuracy, mostly because the dreams themselves are so short, the longest sensation of the passage of time I’ve felt in a dream is less than a minute, and I only know this because I’ve had two lucid dreams, no control over them but the knowledge I was in a dream and seeing something is about as much concrete certainty that the sun is coming up tomorrow.
If it wasn’t for those dreams I probably would have never realized I was aphantaisic, as it was I discovered it when I was about 15 when some very detailed visualization practices that some friends were doing popped up. I knew then that I was different but there was nothing to look up back then and I never felt it affected me so I just moved on until the rediscovery and popularity of it started to rise, and so here I am 🙂
I’d love to hear more about your general dream experience and your general experience of aphantasia as I’m a fairly profound multi-sensory aphantaisic, about as far down whatever spectrum there is to this.