I only see darkness
3 min readByZahraa Mohammed
At first I used to sleep and not dream anything — just vague things, or nothing at all, or as if I were falling into darkness, into an endless black place of darkness, but it was a nightmare, then I'd wake up as if I had really fallen from it. Years passed, and I took the test on this network and discovered that I have aphantasia, and this is true because I don't see any images or realistic colors. I laughed hard because my friend has hyperphantasia. I always wish I could imagine and escape from painful reality, but I can't do that — I only see darkness, and when I think, I think of things as concepts. I do see shapes and details — the shape of an angle, dimensions, the shape of a jaw, mouth, eyes, a smile, and movements — I see movements, but not in image form, only as thoughts, just thinking about them — I think of curly hair or a strange smile. I was a teenager who suffered from overthinking, then I discovered that I notice details with great precision. I loved science a lot, and research — I ask a lot of questions. I love neuroscience and love reading philosophy, I really love systems — my mind is organized, my thinking focuses only on analysis, so I just analyze things, as if I analyze everything, even my own thinking. I have a very high level of abstraction. I also love programming and puzzles a lot, I enjoy thinking, and I learned chess very quickly — I started from zero and didn't know it at all, but when I learned it, my mind was memorizing patterns, and I learned strategy and tactics, without even knowing they were tactics. Within 4–5 months I reached a rating of 600 on the international platform. I think fast and really hate slowness. I enjoy mental/strategy games, and I used to wish I could be a researcher, because I enjoy researching neuroscience and science in general — I have a great passion to be a researcher and I wish for that, but I was bad at academic study; I really hate memorization. I love writing a lot and I'm a writer. The amazing thing about my personality is that I pick up on details with precision and draw very intelligent conclusions, whether in reality or in research as well. Despite the distinctive traits in my personality, I wish I could escape from reality into imagination — I wish I could imagine, I really wish that.
My family has never understood me, and I was more advanced in my thinking than them, and they thought I was strange or eccentric. My sister tells me I'm like an AI because of my movements — she says "I don't know, I feel like you're an AI." None of them understand me, only a few people do. I hate social situations and feel discomfort and unease in family gatherings.
My thinking is random, branching, and unpredictable — I think of more than one thing at a time. From the outside I seem very random, but on the inside, when I think about something, I think of it as a sequence involving people, and I rotate them around, but not in image form — I just think in a sequential way, one thing connecting to another, I retain information and details and draw conclusions quickly. So yes, people say I have hyperactivity, but when I pace around or move a lot, it's just because I'm thinking — when I think and get tense, I walk and pace in circles. I always think while moving. When I hear songs, they stay in my memory as a melody — I hear the singer's voice and the song clearly, but not extremely clearly; I just hear the song well enough, I'm able to hear it. So yes, in the end, I hope science can find a miracle to bring imagination back to me.