[MoSattler]

I am curious: do people with aphantasia dream?

[tambre]

For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.

[navjack27]

You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.

[BoardsOfCanada]

I think that sounds normal. The mind's eye is more like evoking the sense of seeing something without actually seeing it.

[rbetts]

I have aphantasia. I don't see / imagine imagery either awake or asleep. So I don't know that my dreaming experience is particularly different from my waking experience in this way.

[simion314]

I am curious how is solving geometry problems for you, can you imagine slicing some geometric body with a plane and what it results? or given some geometric figure and an instruction to build some lines can you see the result without drawing it on paper ?

Fro me it feels that imagining things uses completely different brain part, because for me it does not feel or look like stuff in my dreams or what eyes can see, imagining things feel different,the scenes feel to me unclear, disappear fast , I do not have the ability to lock the image or rewind like in a video. Remembering a recent scene has a lot more details and colors then some old memory.

For geometry stuff is the same, I can't say I see it but somehow I have an animation my head on how I can transform the geometric stuff, but it is not vivid and it is not like a clear video, feels like is a different part of the brain that does this not the optic part.

[e38383]

I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.

There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.

[madaxe_again]

> It’s more like reading a book.

This analogy may be less communicative than you think, as for me, reading a book is like watching a movie - I don’t see the words on the page, I see what’s happening in the book.

[khazhoux]

I just checked... yes, I dream with imagery.

But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.

But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.

And my audio/music recall is excellent.

[majiy]

I have a very limited visual imagination. I don't know if I would describe it as complete aphantasia, but I think it's close. Dreams are the only time I can see pictures in my mind.

[uclibc]

Yes, from what I've heard other people with aphantasia often dream normally. I certainly do vividly, while struggling a lot to visualize even simple things in my minds eye.

[whitehexagon]

Many vivid dreams a night, almost like the mind is over compensating, quite exhausting at times.

[efilife]

Mu girlfriend does, vividly

[FeistySkink]

Just another data point, but yes. I can dream quite vividly, exactly the way people describe visualizing things day to day.