@ndkpdx
Joined about 3 years agoNeil Kimmelfield practiced tax law for 40 years before retiring in 2019. During that time, he wrote a 1,500-page technical tax treatise and dozens of tax-law articles. Since retiring, he has turned to writing fiction. Neil discovered his aphantasia—after joining the Aphantasia Network in 2022—when he learned that most other people, asked to visualize a ball on a table, actually see a ball with a definite size and color.
When I read “If you were an egg, what type of egg would you be?” nothing came to mind except the idea of a chicken egg, lying flat on a table, taunting me with its plainness. Then I told myself, “Treat this as a serious question!” and immediately the answer swelled up inside me as though it was there all along and I simply hadn’t bothered to look for it. I am a large Faberge egg, a couple of feet taller than I am, lavishly decorated with colors that I, as a color-blind person, would not be able to see and, as an aphant, certain cannot visualize. On the surface of the egg is a doorway, slightly shorter than I am so that, when I step out of my egg self and contemplate my egg self from my human perspective, I have to stoop a little to walk through. Inside the egg is an infinite space that embraces everything I choose to imagine. I think it’s glorious that it’s possible to imagine these things so richly without visualizing them at all.
Three meanings came to mind. For each meaning, what I describe below flooded me instantaneously. 1. Tip, as the tip of my tongue. I had a proprioceptive feeling of my tongue, moving generally from the middle to the end, along with a semi-visual sense of narrowing. 2. Tip, as an additional amount given to a waiter. I had a sense of a large, open, indoor space that could be filled with tables and chairs, as in a restaurant, but as yet had nothing in it. 3. Tip, as in tilting to the side. I had a sense of sitting in a small shell of a boat, kind of a cross between a rowboat and a canoe, very round on the bottom and therefore unstable, with a width that enabled me to grip both sides simultaneously in an effort to remain upright, and a length about the same as my own body. My knowledge of the dimensions comes from the feeling of being inside it and simultaneously seeing it from above, as often happens in a dream. In my waking dream, I was not able to hold the boat steady and felt as if I might tip over.