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.
Oh wow! Whenever I have smoked cannabis (a little when I was a teenager and twice since being an adult–turns out, it’s just really not for me) I had the **exact same** uncanny experience of not really recognizing myself in the mirror. That’s wild.
I think this is very possible for me. The mental impressions and memories surrounding the other senses are just about as blank as my visual aphantasia. Although, just like visual aphantasia, I can easily recognize and place sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile input each time I reencounter them. The "code" for those things is just as strong in my mental encyclopedia as it is for things I've seen.
Yeah, it might have nothing at all to do with my aphantasia. I'm probably just terrible at it! : )
The only reason I think there's actual image storage is that we dream in images. (Or at least most aphantasics do.) And although dream-logic can be nonsensical, dream images aren't complete fabrications completely unrelated to things we've actually seen in life. The dream images are bits and pieces of things we've actually seen, or at least close enough to extrapolate off of. We'd have to stock our files somehow.
I also have a robust inner voice. It's strong running narration/commentary that I have to wonder doesn't stand in for the images most people experience. And I think in full, complex sentences not just concepts. It does make me wonder if the tremendous difficulty I have in learning other languages is somehow tied to the tremendous cost of swapping out my inner narration in translation. When I took language classes, I could study to get an A on tests and in the course, but it was much more like math to me than language -- if that makes any sense. I could never substitute the other language to self-articulate my own thoughts to me.
Well, I'm aphantastic and write fiction for a living, so my imagination seems to have a similar limber quality to yours--making up random stuff and running with it. I think it was more fanciful and I tended to follow the threads more (and for longer) when I was younger, but I still have a very rich internal imaginative life, although with no images. And your English is very good!