Aphantasia and Dreams

July 5, 20251 min readByStephen Ash

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!

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SANDRA Dune•recently

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•recently

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•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

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

teo wen xuan•recently

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

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.

Eric MacDonald•recently

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

Eric me too

Jamie Mason•recently

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

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.