RD Valdes-Dapena

My dreams generally are as colorful and detailed as the real world, though usually full of nonsensical and fantastical elements.  I remember some details when I wake up. Occasionally, sometime later in the day I will recall some details of a dream from the night before.  Someone once suggested that when I wake up I should write down what I remember from my dreams in order to gain some insights into myself and my life.  When I started it would take me only a minute or two to write down what I remembered.  After a few weeks I was remembering so much that I didn't have the time to write it all down. And since I wasn't finding any real value in the practice I gave it up. As an aside, when I go to bed I sometimes will get a brief mental image or hear an imagined sound.  That tells me I'm falling asleep; I just need to not let my awareness of it break the spell and jolt me back into wakefulness.  

I have been photographing the events of my life for decades now.  It was only a few years ago that I realized how tightly that practice is tied to having aphantasia.  For me being able to see my past is so gratifying that until reading your post I never considered what might be happening in heads of "normal" people when they look at photographs of their lives: the recollected sounds and smells, the emotions rekindled.  To be sure my scrapbooks are an imperfect substitute for a typical brain but they are so much better than having my past disappear day by day. As for failing to recognize people, that is a very awkward problem.  When possible I rely on my wife to tell me if I have met somebody before.  And I try not to say "Nice to meet you." until I'm sure I haven't met them before.  When I'm alone and someone approaches with a smile (of recognition?) and says "Hi." I just have to hope that sooner or later they will say something that will clue me in to how they know me and, presumably, I know them.  I have often thought that aphantasia is like a mild case of prosopagnosia ("face blindness").  

As an aphantasiac (?) I find myself obliged to do almost all of my thinking verbally.  I believe the only situation where I think non-verbally is when recalling a familiar space. I would liken it to mentally feeling my way around the space in complete darkness.  I can't sense a whole room that way but I can mentally make my way around to its various elements.

While I have long been aware of the fact that other people could "see" things in their minds in a way that I could not, it was much more recently that I realized that my imaginative inability was more extensive than that. I can not conjure up the taste/smell of food. It did occur once when driving past the site of a former restaurant where I had often ordered a favorite chicken dish.  When I got the "taste" in my mind I was actually startled.  I remember wondering if that happened to "normal" people all the time. I also have a deficit with sound.  There are pieces of instrumental music that I love, but I cannot for the life of me play them in my head or hum them out loud.  It is as if I can't find them in there.  Once I hear the opening notes I recognize them immediately and know how they go.  On the other hand if there is a piece of music I like that has lyrics I can recall the melody with no problem.

Reading posts on this site it is clear that the manifestations of aphantasia vary quite a bit from person to person, but my own sense of memory seems quite similar to yours. About thirty years ago I became keenly aware of a sense that my life was disappearing behind me. I could recall the handful of major milestones in my life, though only in a descriptive sense, but that was it. So I began to make a point of bringing along a point-and-shoot camera (no smart phones, or even digital cameras, back then) whenever I did anything I thought I would want to remember.  I would put the photos into a scrapbook. After decades of this practice I have a bookcase full of scrapbooks. I only occasionally go though any of them, but it comforts me just knowing they are there. They are in effect my external memory.