Kristin Kumpf

I'm delighted to have found this website. I can't remember the fist time I realized that my inner experience was so different from everyone else's. I have a number of memories that stand out, but I couldn't tell you which was the first one. But I do recall that I immediately started surveying my family members and I am the only one who can't actually see an apple when someone says "picture an apple." I felt sad and kind of ripped off about that. I sure as heck was surprised! It might have been when my partner said that she could remember things by picturing the book she read it in and just reading it off. And she can spell aloud quickly because she can picture the word and just read off the letters. Really?!?!?! Then she started asking me about my experience and it was really hard to talk about. How do I remember things? Most puzzling is that I have a really good sense of direction and she doesn't. I can "picture" what's on a certain street corner and find my way back there, but I don't see anything. I can best say that it's kinesthetic and descriptive. If I try to picture an apple I may draw it in the blackness behind my closed eyes, and I'll think of the shape and colour of a delicious apple (one I don't particularly like), or a granny smith apple (which was my favourite at one time, but is not too acidic for me), but I don't see anything. I'm just sort of flipping through memories of apples. I like doing visualizations. Sometimes really interesting ideas come. I can have an experience of what's being described. I can think about the sound of the water, and the sunshine on my face and I can generate, in the present, something of the feeling I have had in the past in the sunshine by water. Once I had such a powerful experience / idea come up in a guided visualization that I immediately wanted to draw what I "saw" because I wanted to really see it. I can get emotionally involved in a story and have an experience of the story, even if I've never had that experience before. I can be "moved" by it, but I don't see anything. Now, in just my short exposure to this website which isn't much beyond scanning one article and looking at this thread, I've had a new realization. It extends to sound. But unlike some of the other folks, I do regularly get a tune stuck in my head. But I sing. I love to sing. So the tune I get stuck in my head is always in my own voice, even though I'm not actually making noise. I have a friend who can write harmonies and she says she can just hear harmonies in her head. I thought she was just a weird anomaly. Wow, you must be like Beethoven or something. Some weird freak of nature. But just now I figured out, it's my aphantasia. I write songs, but I have to do it. I just now tried to make up a tune in my head.... absolutely can't do it. Who knew? And frankly it's a bit disturbing. I guess it's only sad to me because now I know that others can. Bummer! Somehow it was easier believing that those who could were outliers with unusual abilities rather than thinking that I have an unusual deficit. Wow. What lessons can I draw from that?!? Comparisons are odious! Interestingly I do sometimes have vivid dreams in my sleep. And occasionally, in the early stages of sleep where I still think I am awake, I am aware of seeing images. Even in those guided visualizations, if I am approaching a meditative state, I may get a flash of something like I would experience in a dream. More often I get a "vivid idea" of something that is almost a picture... more like an impression. I do wonder if my aphantasia is protective in my line of work. I am a psychotherapist. I have heard some stories that are quite ghastly; "unimaginable" cruelty. And some do haunt me a bit. How much harder it must be to push such memories away if they come with the full spectrum of sensations. When I think of this, I am tremendously grateful for my "deficit." Thanks for putting website together.