Comment by devindotcom
6 hours ago
Interesting to me that three different people have responded with the same "I'm also aphantasic and dream normally" start to their message.
6 hours ago
Interesting to me that three different people have responded with the same "I'm also aphantasic and dream normally" start to their message.
When you express you have aphantasia to someone, one of the most common questions is whether you can dream. As someone with it: Yes I can dream. They're so real they are lifelike. And not just visually. In my dreams, reality and history itself can be different and to me, history didn't change. It just is.
I rememeber in one dream I was some sort of captain and I saw one of my closest friends. We'd been crewmates for the past 40 years and I remember all my memories with him and why I trusted him with my life. I was 22 when I had the dream.
That's fascinating. Do you gain access to facts or knowledge that are verifiable afterwards? Have you ever become fluent in a foreign language for a dream?
In my experience, it feels real but the feelings doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It's more like the set of a play than a real world, where a thin facade evokes all the right cues in the audience but couldn't actually be used to trick someone into thinking it's real.
I don't have aphantasia but I sometimes also have dreams that are so realistic that when I wake up I feel as if it was some type of alternative reality. In some cases it is also as if I am watching a "movie" where the life I am experiencing is not my own, but I will still know each person.
It is a good question because aphantasics that can dream normally are far less likely to engage in the sort of "aphantasia is just semantics" denalism that is largely disproven given modern science and online discourse. I.e. it is a very strong credibility signal that what follows is not just cope / self-delusion, but actually potentially useful and interesting self-report.