I come from a family successful artists and designers. I was the black sheep being verbal and incapable of drawing. But art having been important in my home growing up I have also spent much time in art museums, both at home and when I travel. Here is what is curious. In my 60s my wife got me to sign up for a sculpture class at a prestigious art academy that happened to be close to where we were living at the time. I had never sculpted a human figure in my life, but my very first standing nude was remarkably good. Over the next few years until we moved I was a regular student in the sculpture class. The experience was always very visceral, the feel of the clay and the look of the arm or the leg or the back but never a scene of the figure as a whole nor and no understanding of where or why my sculpture as a whole did not reflect the model standing before me The last pieces that I did were not really improved over the first. And I still can't draw.
Your linguistic point is interesting. Professionally I was a business strategy consultant and economist, which sounds grander than it was, but I have also been a life long amature poet and have edited a number of books for friends. I love words: as a kid I used to read the dictionary; I am fascinated with etymology and ancient and modern Names; the sound, texture abd rhythm of language fascinate me. Perhaps this is all over compensating for my aphantasia. BUT I have never been much good at long form composition, which may be a memory function. My wife is a novelist amd remembers her entire life and every dumb thing that I have ever done. Her books and stories exist in her as complex structures. The most that I can manage architecturally is a sonnet and then I need paper to hold on to the whole thing.
Michael & Holly too I don't know if this will help anyone, but I can spell words that I use everyday but words that I only occationally write I fall back on my own so-so version of sounding-it_out. Usually that gets me close enough for the spell checker to recognize it. Names I often have to resort to a Google search. In computer programming I know clearly the nature of a function that I want to use but I have to look it up to get the correct spelling and format. Even with multiplication and division, if I don't have a calculator handy I resort to rules for figuring it out that I made up as a kid. My point is that I can remember ways of figuring things out far easier than I can remember things. They tell me that it is common with aging that remembering names, actually nouns in general is what first begins to deteriorate, while remembering how to do things persists. Well I have always been terrible at remembering names but I have always been good at figuring things out. I suspect the method memory is an entirely different creature than thing memory. in the same way narratives may be easier to recall than "facts" like dates and names, types of behavior rather than who did what when and where. I realize at this very late stage in my life that I have traded heavily variations of this type of "memory" to make up for my aphantasia and I believe closely related weakness in fact memory.
As long as Julian has identified himself as definitely not an expert let me add some thoughts based on the same qualification. As I understand it the the brain does not store memories of any kind in any thing like a closet full of VHS tapes. Instead there is some sort of data disagregation process and what is stored is the ability to reconstruct something for the conscious mind to consider. Supposedly, much of what we think we are seeing everyday is reconstructed, which is why occasionally we see something we don't recognize for a moment and then we realize it is an old sweater on a chair and not the cat we no longer own. Aphantasia may have something to do with the degree or situations in which the brain can do this reconstruction process. My dreams sound a lot like yours. And thorough I have spent my life at a keyboard writing I still cannot spell with out a spell checker. But I have found this idea of memory as a disagregation/reassembly process a useful crib for thinking about what is going on in my head. But like the man said: I am not an expert.
I am 81 and only just recently stumbled into this. The line that jumped out at me in Nadia's post is "As far as I can remember, going back, I never had good visualization." I've been trying to remember not just what I could visualize in the past, what I remembered in the past and what I did not remember in the past. For example, I remember at the beginning of 8th grade discovering that I could not remember anything that had happened in 7th grade. I had no idea that other people could really see things in their "minds eye". and assumed that it was a poetic metaphor until recently when I read about aphantasia. But I do have a memory of not being able to memorize and of forgetting experiences. But I don't remember ever having a clear idea of what sort of memory was "normal" any more than I knew that most people can see an apple in their mind.
I have a fairly high degree of aphantasia, while my daughter is hyperphantasia, a difference that we have only recently discovered. So, we have been having interesting conversations. There are a number of consistent memory recall differences between us, in addition to her vivid images and my near lack of them. She has vivid autobiographical memory while mine is sketchy at best. I am a terrible speller while she has no problem. I have never been able to learn a foreign language. She learned French and Italian in college, and then became interested in Russian literature in her senior year and in a couple of years learned Russian (considered one of the most difficult languages) well enough to be teaching it as a grad student at Columbia University. My poor ability to memorize and remember has not hindered me as I have a PhD in Economics and I had a successful career as a corporate strategy consultant. Looking back, I remember often arriving for meetings not remembering what they were about... BUT being able to very quickly figure out what was going on. Thinking about it I was/am extremely good at figuring out all sorts of things, which I suspect is in part some sort of back door memory recall process, which some people might call intuition. And right now my intuition keeps telling me that the aphantasia flag is signalling a host of past memory/behavior issues that all seem to be falling into place.