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I found I had aphantasia as a flow-on from something else I was investigating.
I have known for a long time that I had trouble watching movies because I lose track of who the characters are. My wife started watching Married at first sight and I got really confused with it. 3 of the ladies had the same shaped face, hair style and colour and I could not tell them apart at all. I searched on Google to find out why and found about Prosopagnosia.
Reading about this it mentioned it was common with aphantasia. I kept reading and it sounded more and more like fiction. This idea that people could see images, make sounds, imagine touch and actually feel it all. I asked my wife if it made sense to her, and she just looked at me like I was mad.
Doing more reading since, I’ve discovered I have SDAM as well as autism. Sometimes life would be amazing if we got an instruction manual for our minds.
What a journey! Your last paragraph hit hard.
The funniest bit was after I’d done an online autism screening test, I sent the results to my wife saying I think I may have autism. She responded saying she’s known for a long time.
That little image with the apple.
I thought people meant it figuratively when they said they could visualize something. That image showed me most definitely not.
Yes, so many figures of speech like “life flashing in front of your eyes”. Heck, even “can you picture it” or “can’t unsee”.
When I realized, they were not completely metaphorical, my mind was blown 🤯
Oh God, I didn’t even think about ”can’t unsee" being literal. That was a mind fuck for me just now
I now have what Germans refer to as “Schadenfreude” every time someone says that. :>
so picture this… or imagine…
these phrases irritate me.
I think there was a youtube video by an artist years ago I watched. BOOM
For me it was this video from Anthony Padilla, I left it playing when I went to sleep, I didn’t sleep that night. First thing in the morning I called a family member “can you really… umm… like… see things in your mind?”. Before that I had no idea people can really visualize.
I saw a video describing the term, and it all clicked. Before that I described it as my thoughts being only ‘conceptual’. I always struggled with therapy cause I couldn’t translate my thoughts into words. Haven’t gone since I discovered the term, but since then I’ve gotten a lot better at articulating my thoughts. Much moreso in text than verbally, though.
I listened to a podcast of the YouTuber CPG Grey - Hello Internet if I’m not mistaken. He went pretty into detail about it, and I more or less got convinced that I had it to a degree. I tried taking a test, and yup - it’s pretty empty visually up in my nuggin :)
I was 41, I stumbled across a post on r/aphantasia…I read a bit and it hit me like a brick to the face…WTAF people can “see” shit in their minds.
I asked my partner, she said no those sayings are not just metaphors. 5 minutes later another brick to the face, apparently “getting a song stuck in your head” means you’ll basically listen to a song in your mind on repeat…
It has been 2 years, nothing really changed externally. It did help a lot with me understanding my own thought processes. I suspect I have some SDAM also, I don’t really remember my childhood without something to prompt the memory, nothing ever “just pops into my head” from back then.
i started recovery and one of the tools was to use your third eye. i had a hard time getting it, and someone explained to me what they saw, and my mind was blown.
Just found this video in my youtube recommendations and now I know… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewsGmhAjjjI
I have kinda always known that I don’t really work the same way as some others do, but the more recent discussions on just how well some people can visualize things led to me reevaluating myself.
I think a pretty big tipper for me was in how different my dreams are in comparison to my waking ability to visualize. Total night and day difference. When asleep (or just after waking) I have vivid and lucid dreams. While awake I can’t conjure a stick figure or a simple apple.
I think I stumbled upon the term somewhere online at some point, and realized it described me. It just made a bunch of stuff click into place. I look back on times now where I was able to visualize colours and patterns in my head while high listening to music and thought I was hallucinating a lot differently now lol. Turns out that’s just what most people can normally do
different parts of the brain are responsible for them, that’s why you can still have vivid dreams but not be able to use your third eye when you’re awake.
+1
Wanted to add that once I had some drug- and sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations at a hospital, and I was shocked that I could ‘visualize’, in a similar way to how I dream, I guess. I had never had a comparable experience before.
So, do you have visual dreams? I saw the other thing you posted that stated that dreaming experiences (among other visual phenomena) tended to be muted amongst aphants. Do you find that to be the case for yourself?
Dreams (or, at least, recall) tend to be rare for me. Although melatonin (but not very reliably) tend to make it more likely for me to have vivid dreams (melatonin gave me the most vivid dreams ever too). But when I do [remember?] dream, they can be pretty vivid, I guess.
Which is a mind fuck for me, because I cannot prove it, as that would result in a paradox (I can’t visualize anymore while conscious).
Anecdotally, I’ve seen quite a lot of aphants saying they allegedly have vivid dream; the community seems split on this though.
What’s your experience? edit: I saw you said you have vivid dreams, but are they frequent?
I suffered from sleep paralysis for a period of about five years (as an adult) that had accompanying vivid dreams of a horrible sort. So, after trying a few things to help, I kinda decided that the cure was going to have to be learning as much as I could about the dreaming process so it no longer could result in the negative experiences I was having.
To that end, I began to get really serious about learning to lucid dream. Started with dream diaries, and reality checks and went on a two-year journey of really mastering the art of falling asleep. It got to the point that with about a week of lead up time to get in the right mind frame, I could trigger a lucid dream pretty reliably about 3 or 4 times a week.
Now, I am out of practice, but I still get them around once or twice a month. Best thing of course is that the sleep paralysis no longer bothers me. So, I got that going for me, which is nice.
Ooh, yikes. I experienced sleep paralysis exactly once in my life and it was the most terrified I’ve ever been, especially not knowing at the time that any such thing exists. Sympathies that you had to deal with it to a much greater degree, and so glad for you that it’s not a problem anymore. 💜
Yeah it definitely sucked quite badly while it was happening, though I am oddly glad that I was forced to experience it.
Now I can kinda claim that I survived a demon sitting on my chest and torturing me for hours at a time. And I did it through science!
You have a great and commendable mindset! I’m glad you’re doing better and you can freely talk about AND used it to improve yourself!
