Richard Hunt

Thanks for this well written article. I have a degree of aphantasia and quite severe SDAM. My personal history memories are mostly remembering the fact of doing something or being somewhere rather than the experience of it. I have some visual memories but they are just very faint still images that distort and then disappear after a second or so. I cling onto these precious little glimpses but they tend to get lost. People sometimes think that if I don’t remember an event then that means it wasn’t important to me, which isn’t true at all.

Hi, It’s an interesting question. I am not completely aphantastic but my mind’s eye is very weak and mental images are fleeting. The few dreams I can remember are similarly vague. Just one or two disconnected “scenes” with no kind or storyline. I’ve never had a visually vivid dream. I never smell or taste anything in a dream. My wife can describe in detail a long series of events that took place in a dream and that has made me aware of how different my dreams are.