Kaylee L

For events and appointments, I use a calendar. I also have alarms on my phone to remind me about daily tasks. For anything beyond that, I do struggle. The best advice I've gotten is to pick one thing per day that you want to work on, and work on that. It's much more productive than task-switching.  I still feel like I add more to my to-do lists than I cross off. I have to periodically review my goals and sometimes I have to let go of something so I'll have time for all the other things. Chronic pain also limits how much I can do, so that's part of the problem for me. But focusing on one thing per day has helped a lot.  For apps, I use TickTick. I've tried many apps, and this is the one that works best for me personally. I use it both for taking notes as well as for task lists. And I can set reminders on it; I find that this works much better for me than my phone's default alarm clock and calendar. It also has a feature called "habit" where, for example, I have it remind me to drink water 3 times a day (because I tend to get distracted and forget). On a regular alarm clock, I'd have to make 3 different alarms, which really clutters things up. But on TickTick, it's just a single entry with 3 reminder times, so it stays uncluttered and makes my life easier. 

Hi Tony, Yes, I've learned a lot of surprising things too, and I find the great variety of experiences fascinating. "It's always nighttime" is a good way to describe aphantasia. I heard someone else describe it in a similar way, which also underlined the difference between imagination and visualization, something along the lines of, "I have a conceptual imagination, so if you say 'think of an apple on the table' then I know there's an apple on the table, but I can't see it because the room is dark." Autism is a bit of mixed bag, and sometimes it seems like the negatives outweigh the positives, but I can't think of any downside to aphantasia. Trying meditation was a very frustrating experience, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't need visualizations. I can get to where I want to be in life without that. I don't feel like I'm missing anything important. On the other hand, some of the things I've read suggest that aphantasia may be responsible for the innate tendency to "be in the present moment" and notice the world around me, and I consider that a valuable trait. So, definitely not a bad thing!  I also love the sound of waves crashing on the shore, and don't need to see it to appreciate it. :)

All of what you wrote fits aphantasia. I take it that the dreams are the thing that's making you question whether you have it. Aphantasia is an inability to have voluntary visualizations. Dreams and hallucinations are involuntary visualization; those are controlled by a different process, so people with aphantasia can dream and have hallucinations. And while visual people might use visual memory to describe places and give directions, aphantasic people tend to use spacial and conceptual memory to do that; we can accomplish the same thing through different, non-visual means. So yes, your aphantasia sounds very clear-cut to me. :)    Just a note, I'm also autistic, as is my spouse and a bunch of people we know, and we all have tons of empathy. The problem is we don't always know how to show it, and when people don't see the expected outward expression, they assume we don't care, even though we care a lot. When I don't know what's the right thing to say, I often end up not saying anything. I also can't do facial expressions, so I usually just look "neutral" even when I'm feeling strong emotions. The idea that autistic people lack empathy was based on outside observers looking at non-verbal kids who couldn't tell them what they were actually feeling and thinking on the inside. Newer studies (and better communication aids for non-verbal kids) have found that our empathy is unusually high and can be overwhelming. I think the single most helpful thing for me, was taking a first aid course, followed by a PFA course (psychological first aid, for helping with emotional trauma) because they tell you exactly what to say to someone who's hurt, so there's none of that internal "oh no, oh no, what do I say? what do I do? how can I help?" while standing there frozen with indecision and with a neutral expression like nothing's going on. I still can't do facial expressions, but they've taught me words and actions to express the empathy I was already feeling. ... I'm also reminded of this:

Wow! Now THAT is a superpower I would love to have. I mean, yeah, very useful for cooking, but being able to "sample" dishes on a restaurant menu and then decide, that is just amazing! Since you ask, I was surprised by something I learned from an article on here today: the practitioner started by asking me to visualize... I told her I couldn’t do this... She asked me if I could imagine myself floating. Just floating. I said yes. (I recently learned that the ability to do this may be associated with motor imagery, something not everybody can do). from https://aphantasia.com/hypnosis-with-aphantasia/ I can do that too (not specifically floating, but motor imagery in general). It helped me learn to dance, and I was surprised that not everyone can do it. I just assumed everyone could do it, since I know that they use it in sports and music as a way to practice without physically doing the movements. I guess that's kind of the opposite of your question, finding out that not everyone can do a thing that I take for granted. I hope you get more replies; I'm also curious to see what other non-obvious things people do. I find it very interesting to compare our different experiences and learn about all the variety that exists. :)

I prefer aphantasic, since it's an adjective. I'm okay with aphant, though the noun form sounds weird to me in a sentence (I am an aphant vs I am aphantasic). We generally only use nouns for things like profession (I am a writer, a student, etc) and use adjectives for personal descriptors (I am tall, short-sighted, Jewish). I think "person with aphantasia" is kinda clunky, but I wouldn't be upset by it. None of them are offensive or anything. Personally, I use whatever makes most sense grammatically. If I'm describing myself, I'll say "I am aphantasic." If we're talking about what life is like for us, I would say, "Living with aphantasia..." or "Having aphantasia..." Now, plurals are a different animal: aphantasics doesn't sound quite right, so I'd go with either aphantasic people or aphants. Interestingly, the awkwardness of "aphant" in the singular is not present in the plural; "aphants" sounds natural. I also feel like the plural "people with aphantasia" doesn't have the weirdness of "person with" so I'm actually fine with any of them in the plural. Most of the time, I'll go with identity-first because it makes more sense to me conceptually (I *am* this way), and that's also usually the most grammatically-appropriate form... but if a different form would work better, I'm not gonna twist a sentence into an awkward knot to try to force it to take a form that just doesn't fit. In some cases, you could tweak the sentence to use the other form, but in some cases the grammar really wants to go one way or the other, so I just let the sentence guide me.