When I daydream, my thoughts drift through silent conversations-sometimes with myself, sometimes not.
I might not be able to conjure images, but in their place my imagination is dominated by words. Somewhere in there, it hit me: Instead of having a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s voice. But instead my search results were filled with essays and articles, mentions of studies in reputable sources, charts illustrating degrees of visualization. When I got home, I googled “inability to visualize.” Part of me expected the search results to boil down to: Just kidding, turns out we were all just using different words to describe the same thing. Apparently most people can close their eyes and see-with varying degrees of clarity-whatever it is they want to see: a beach, an apple, their husband’s face. Something about that feeling and the way the sun was hitting the mountains in the distance pinged off an impassioned, imaginary conversation that was running through my head, and it made me wonder how someone else might experience that same exact moment, if rather than having words running through their head, they might see pictures layering themselves upon the mountains. Until a few weeks ago, when I was walking on a trail near my house, paying attention to the sensation of a cool breeze as it eased the tension in my temples.
Over the next few years, I thought of visualization only occasionally. After a few days of simmering incredulity, thoughts of aphantasia faded from my mind. Part of me couldn’t let go of the idea that our differences must be more of a matter of communication than actual experience. I retweeted the article, expressing my amazement, and a writer I know told me his novel ideas come to him like movies that he writes down after watching, I’d heard of writers whose plots come to them in dreams, and that I could understand-my dreams are intensely visual, fully immersive experiences-but to see a story while awake? I believed him, and yet I didn’t. But for the first thirty-four years of my life, whenever someone talked about “seeing” something in their mind or instructed me to visualize something-whether it was a ball of light moving between chakras or a goal I wanted to achieve-I assumed it was just a turn of phrase.Īnd then I read an article by poet Katie Prince, and I felt a wave of awed recognition roll through me.Īphantasia. But what I never see is this: a picture.Īpparently this is unusual. It depends on how bright my surroundings are. If I close my eyes I see blackness, or perhaps some fuzzy pixel-like tinges of gray and red as light seeps through my eyelids.
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