I had the same thing happen with a friend. She was saying I was jumping on the Aphantasia trend because it was cool and that I could not know until I was diagnosed. TBH, I wouldn't even know what doctor could diagnose Aphantasia without an FMRI which is expensive and hard to justify for something that is not an illness/disability. Anything that is not an FMRI can't be measured and would rely on what you tell the doctor which can't be verified. Unless... a lie detector! As a side note, I don't know when and it what niche of society having Aphantasia became trendy, but I found it hilarious. I was scared as hell for like 5 minutes when I first found out while I realized that I am doing great in my life. When thinking about lies, I try to think about the incentive behind the lie. If there is none, its more likely to be true. I don't know what advantage could come of lying about having Aphantasia, but maybe coming from that angle you could prod your parent's mind to believe you? This depends heavily on historical context and your relationship with your parents so its definitely not bullet-proof. My dad was scared shitless when I told him. He called me the next day to tell me we could train for it and find a cure to which I laughed and told him there is nothing to cure. Glad to know it was a well intentioned comment.
Definitely not an expert, but the ability to visualize and dream vividly but not visualize _while conscious_ is the case for some people with aphantasia. As far as all dreams having visuals, that could be the case, there is not a lot of understanding around sleep, but last I remember the consensus is that when you go into REM sleep you "always" dream, but you don't always remember what you dream. I would say that that is the case whether you have aphantasia or you don't. I have the same case you have where I dream very vividly but have aphantasia and I remember about 10x more dreams than my wife who does not have aphantasia. Sleep happens in cycles that move from light sleep, to deep sleep, to REM that happen in roughly 1.5 hour cycles during the night so roughly 5 on a good night sleep. (Cool article on sleep stages https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/11752397946003-Sleep-Stages) I believe if you are woken up in REM you are way likelier to remember dreams, also, you usually wake up for some period of time between cycles where you will likely remember what you were dreaming last.
Thank you for your reply Alice! I think part of what makes it so hard to describe is due to it not being visual or auditory in nature so its extremely complicated to explain it lexically. The part where you said "twisting my body into shapes that I might not even be able to actually assume, finding connections that I am not ready to put into words" is something I can absolutely understand in a visceral way. Walking is my go-to activity for problem solving. I usually have to pull myself out of my world when tackling a problem and force myself to walk and then everything just pieces itself together. 15 minutes of walking often equate to hours of working and iterating unclearly, not even thinking about the problem by just leaving it there in my head as a background task. Fantastic to hear someone else's PoV on this "kinesthetic" thinking/imagining. I think as time goes on I'll find much better ways to express this way of thinking. Thank you very much for sharing!
I journal on and off, but when I do it is aggressive and quite comprehensive. I have been very consistent the past few years going for months of journaling at a time during a year and have found the following helpful: - Write on a computer: Writing by hand is extremely slow and could be frustrating, I started handwriting but I'm to impatient for it and could not get the ideas down close to fast enough. As a side note, when I am sad writing by hand tends to be better for me and I don't mind the slowness. - Learn to type fast: Typing fast makes me journal a train of thought and I get very interesting insights by just flowing with it at the speed I can manage. This also reduces the commitment time. - Answer a question: When I've been most consistent it has been because I have a list of questions that I keep adding to and I journal by addressing one specific question each day. These questions seem to be about what I think about something or how I feel about it. For example: what does marriage mean to me, if money was not part of the equation what would I do, what is freedom/power/motivation according to me, what would my life be like if I was a sentient boulder, etc. These usually create follow-up questions. - Gratitude Journaling: When I'm not feeling particularly insightful, I just gratitude journal by writing what happened during the day in a list such as "The amazing coffee I made this morning". This was very hard at the start, but as you bring focus to it it becomes easier and you find more to feel grateful about. - Write about the feelings you want to evoke or understand: Ties to gratitude, I seldom think about gratitude, but writing what it means to me and finding the small pieces made it extremely present. I don't even gratitude journal anymore as after a year I just feel it often and check it in my mind instead of writing it down. If I want to evoke assertiveness I write about it until I really define it and find what is in line with my character and meaning of assertiveness which makes it easy to act in line with it as I've already sorted out the hard part of understanding it. - Track how you feel once a month: When I started, I would just write how I felt, when I went back and read it it was amazing to see how much I had grown and changed which was a huge dopamine hit that made me want to journal even more. Good luck! And enjoy the process > Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
I've been reaching out to friends and relatives trying to figure that out myself. I too have extremely vivid dreams but forget about it when I'm awake, maybe if I'm falling asleep or in moments where I get super distracted and drift out of existence I get like a 100ms flash of something like a dream but that is it. Everyone I talked to said that their visualization is at some spectrum of the visualization in a dream. One friend actually put a number on it and said it was like 60% of a dream because the immersion was not there as he knew it was not real. I can't know how they visualize, but based on what I've asked and have been told by all of them that it is to some degree like the visualization in dreaming. As I can visualize vividly in dreams I can confidently say I cannot remotely summon any feeling or visualization that is like a dream of my own volition.