Hi everyone, I have discovered i have Aphantasia, but i have very vivid lucid dreams. For many years, when i was younger my lucid dreams were in the darkness but i read something somewhere in my 20's which told me to do 'vision on' as a command in my dream. Since then my visualisations have been strong and vivid. In waking life, i cant visualise as such but remember the feelings of the dreams. I made a short film using AI as a bit of memory therapy. Hope you like it. All content is AI generated but the story is human.

Enjoy!

Aphantasia and Dreams

July 5, 20251 min readByStephen Ash

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Shari Morehouse•recently•edited

I have aphantasia when I’m awake but I have very vivid dreams. I can generally remember my dreams when I wake up although they fade quickly. interestingly enough, I’ve never had a nightmare . My dreams seem to often be an amalgam of things that have happened during the day or things. I’ve watched on tv. I also have recurring dreams which are most often stress dreams.

Ian Ziegler•recently•edited

I have life long aphantasia but I lucid dream very well and so I get a peak at what the general population can do in their waking life. In my dreams, if I understand it to be a dream, I can move objects with my mind, I can conjure people I know into existence and if I’m doing a very good job I can warp into a different scene entirely. For myself, I have to balance my manipulation of the dream to stay within it, too much conscience effort brings awakeness. I “understand” the minds eye through this other skill I have but it’s still very intriguing that most people can do this at will when they are awake. I’m not jealous and I am career successful, so it doesn’t seem to be a terrible thing just a different thing, to me.

Diana Bonyhadi•recently•edited

Finally I have a name for what I have. Everyone has a hard time believing that I have no visual imagery in my dreams. I explain to them that it almost like I am listening to an audiobook. I know what’s happening by description. But never a picture. Same for everything else. No i can’t picture an apple. Or anything else. My question is. How do you all experience dreams? I sometimes have them but know I am not seeing them

Diana Bonyhadi•recently•edited

Also I am crappy at math because I cannot rotate objects in my head or do any of the things math assumes or needs me to do. Anyone else?

Martha MacTavish•recently•edited

Any area of math just never computed for me. 90% in all my science classes and 35% in calculus. Not sure why though. Can anyone explain with regard to aphantasia?

Neal White•recently•edited

I have aphantasia, but I can easily tell which rotated objects match another (as in IQ tests). I'm fast and very accurate, but I can't "see" anything, I just "know" the solution. I'm also good with drawings and maps. I can even draw what I can't see (I know a line goes here or that area is dark). I describe it as trying to look through black glass. I can't see it, but somehow I know it's there.

Steve Carter-Lovejoy•recently•edited

Yes! most subjects I've picked up very well, but geometry, calculus - just can't do it! On my way to a PhD in biology I took beginning calculus 3 times, never passed it.

Rox H•recently•edited

I have aphantasia and had such vivid dreams as a child that some dreams created a second reality. There was an entire ‘part of my childhood’ that I realized was dreamt when I was an early teen. I also have lucid dreams and spend most of my time flying when it happens.

SANDRA Dune•recently•edited

I have aphantasia while awake. Yet I have clear, visual, colorful dreams and sometimes also visualize clearly while in a half-awake state. I have been able to generate a colored, somewhat clear visualization once or twice while in fairly deep meditation. Otherwise, while awake I have don't visualize at all, just a shadow-cloud of shape at the most.

Jester Maurer•recently•edited

i lucid dream a lot of the time, like to the point where i mix up if stuff from my dreams, i can kinda see stuff i think like its more there then when im awake

Justin Clark•recently•edited

I don't have dreams that are visual of course but do have strong feelings from them. I wake almost immediately each morning which is strange and do feel rather refreshed. The only odd thing is that each day I wake up, I have a new song fresh in my head... a new song as if I've already been singing it, each and every day... weird.

teo wen xuan•recently•edited

me too!! my head automatically plays something when im awake

teo wen xuan•recently•edited

i have aphantasia and most of my dreams i have all my senses except for vision for whatever reason... i do happen to have 2 dreams (one in june 2023, the other in june 2025!!!) where i do have vision! these two dreams were so out of the world, taking place in totally fictional places (my dreams mostly involve irl people), and when i woke up i really had to record them down because of how unreal it was

RuoQing Zhao•recently•edited

I’ve found that during half-awake state, I can see colors in my visual field. By intensely focusing on one point, I can indeed perceive colors in that small area. But what’s most fascinating is that during this half-awake state, my body often feels numb, which is normal. However, when I try hard to generate colors in my mind, my entire body—especially my face and hands—starts tingling intensely. It feels like my old computer struggling to run Helldivers 2, with its fans roaring like a helicopter taking off. It’s as if both scenarios involve some invisible CPU working under extreme pressure.

Neal White•recently•edited

When my eyes are closed, all I see is black. However, if I'm tired, or when I (rarely) have a lucid dream, I can paint blurry colors in my visual field. I can cause the colors to swirl or change colors. Dark colors are easiest, white is very hard and I've only achieved that a few times in my life. (I'm in my 60s.) If I concentrate, I can form crude pictures: blue sky, green grass, dark and blurry forest. It's not even as clear as a child's finger painting. I rarely have lucid dreams, but when I do, I try to experiment. It feels like my vision is blocked by black glass, but sometimes I can punch a hole through that glass wall. Usually, what's behind is quite blurry, really just a jumble of colors, but sometimes I see "the illusion of detail". That's an artistic technique of using lines or squiggles to give the impression of detail which isn't actually there.

Eric MacDonald•recently•edited

I am aphantasic and so far as I know I have never dreamt. My wife used to ask me about my dreams, but I never had a dream that I could speak about.

Jerry Williams•recently•edited

Eric me too

Jamie Mason•recently•edited

I'm aphantasic and also had lucid dreaming all my life. That is until I started taking a sleep cocktail of supplements to help with middle-age sleep deprivation. (Magnesium-Threonate, Apigenin, Tart Cherry Extract, Myo-Inositol, and Glycine) I never minded the lucid dreaming. And we are talking about the same thing, right? Dreaming, but being aware the entire time that you are dreaming? I could even control/steer the dreams to some degree. I rarely had nightmares, because I could just stop them or steer them off the scary stuff. Something in that sleep cocktail pulled the plug on the lucid dreaming. I don't really miss it. I sleep more deeply, but I do have the occasional nightmare now.

Myra Sontheimer•recently•edited

Love the video. I have visual dreams as well. Some of my childhood "memories" are visual dreams. My family doesn't remember these events, and it's been a joke in my family that I have two lives. The dreams feel like something that happened to me in my childhood. Most of my childhood memories are directly related to a photograph I have seen repeatedly. Still not a visual memory, but easily described verbally and placed on a timeline.