Banned from the theater of the mind for non-participation (also I pooped in the lobby) smh my damn head
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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i remember telling my dad i dream in words when i was probably 7 or 8 and he looked at me like he should've drowned me in the tub. I never knew there was a word for this.
he was an artist of many sorts so what i said just made no sense whatsoever to him.
that isn't the case anymore but when I was a kid most of what i could visualize was just words and such, which really helped me with math and spelling, but i was terrible with art. I could copy what my dad drew if i saw him do it line by line but that was it.. i could never draw on my own because i could never visualize things.
that changed at some point around middle school or high school i guess.. could be weed-smoking related, dunno. I do recall annoying the fuck out of my friends when we smoked weed because I would see this grid of blue dots in my field of vision a lot, whether my eyes were open or closed and it just amazed me.
"You're walking along in a desert when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Roll for initiative."
I somehow cured my aphantasia and it practically flashbanged me for a few days while my brain figured out how to tone it down to the normal level.
Reveal your secrets to procure the skill of seeing images in your head
Meditation while trying to fall asleep for several years. Originally this was just noting exercises to help process things my autistic little brain had maybe missed that day - as well as examining feeling that were perhaps suppressed while more lucid. Eventually the wake/sleep began blurring, and I figured out how to visualise piece by piece,. At first, it was just very basic shapes, which I could make move when tied to emotions. Then it became repeating, shifting, full-field patterns/shapes, initially monochrome, but becoming colorful over time when made to move quickly or with purpose.
Then suddenly I wasn't doing it manually anymore, and it got a lot stronger. It took several days for it to calibrate and tune its self into a useful, non-overwhelming sense. I assume most people learn to access that subconscious layer when young, and settle on a baseline they find acceptable to their mind? I heavy a heavy suspicion that autism and dissociative affect can be linked with aphantasia.
Very interesting, I thought aphantasia was just a static thing. I didn’t know visualisation could be a learned skill. Thank you for sharing
I cured mine with weed. How did you cure yours?
I never want to be cured bc its fun to flashbang people who can visualise stuff with and i dont wanna hit myself with my flashbangs
Disney releases Afantasia and it's just the soundtrack to Fantasia
Aphantasia is one of those things I just can't conceive of as someone with a very active imagination. Do these people not dream?
I just can't conceive of
So you're having trouble imagining... 
Imagine the thing where you can't imagine having aphantasia but it's for imagining other things.
A very good friend of mine is apahantasiac, and he has a great imagination, it's just that he can't picture stuff when imagining, rather it's verbsl information. He's great at weaving tales, and he's a wonderful writer, he just doesn't see pictures in his mind when he uses them, he describes it as it being kind of "all feeling, all concepts".
He barely remembers dreams, but when he does he just remember how he felt snd the interactions he had.
It's kinda weird, but I think I have a more minor aphantasia? Like, I hallucinate, sometimes vividly, but when I'm trying to visualize something, I just see blackness, sometimes a vague shape in the dark. I do dream, but I usually don't remember much visual information except sometimes the shapes of things. My other senses, however, I can stimulate pretty much whenever and however I want. I can just say to my brain, "Do I taste blood?" And within a couple minutes, I'll taste blood.
I do (albeit rarely) "seeing" in dreams is disconnected from being unable to visualize things while awake, at least in my case.
I am totally, I do dream vivid nightmares. I cannot picture anything, I thought it was a metaphor my whole life.
I have an extremely detailed and resilient memory that is entirely textual descriptions. E.g. if you ask where the jam is I think something like fridge -> glass jar -> plastic tray of condiments - top left -> secondarily between the neighbouring tray if misplaced
I have an extremely vivid imagination, adore daydreaming, adore fantasy, adore roleplay.
Im aphantasiac, I see visual images when dreaming. I'm not sure bc i have no baseline to compare it with, but it feels like aphantasia makes it harder for me to tell dreams from reality bc i'm just not used to seeing stuff that isnt there. I really dont like dreaming much bc of this
I do not have it completely but some form of it. I see some things in details, other things are like I don't have glasses and have bad vision. It's honestly gotten worse with age. I have horribly vivid dreams to the point that I miss sleeping without dreaming. I like taking pictures because often it helps a lot when I recall something I often see the picture more clearly.
