@Shieldmaiden · Joined January 2026
Immersive spatial imagery feels rich and detailed yet lacks visual brightness, challenging conventional categorizations of mental imagery.
On “How did you first discover aphantasia?”
Over the past couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection, counseling, and “shadow work” to better understand how my mind works, especially after some major life changes and losses. As part of that process, I started talking more openly about how I think, remember, imagine, and experience things internally, both in therapy and through a lot of personal writing and online discussion. As I kept describing the way my inner world works; how I visualize, how I process memories, how I experience sensory and emotional imagery. People and resources kept pointing me toward things related to mental imagery and visualization. After a few months of that, I was directed to information about aphantasia (and the imagery spectrum more broadly), and when I looked into it, it immediately resonated with how I’ve always experienced my own mind. That was the first time I realized there was actually a name and a framework for something I had always assumed was just how everyone thought.