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What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream? I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucination

What do you see when you close your eyes? Just light and colors? What about when you dream? I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count. If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment

Citizen_Lame 1y ago
Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well. Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.
- bored 1y ago
  What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like it’s a black box to you
vidarh 1y ago
I dream in images but have only once in my life seen anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking state. I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow. But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.
- godelski 1y ago
  > I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow. FWIW, this gets better after practice
  - vidarh 1y ago
    How? I've tried writing it down many times over the years, but never recalled anything by the time I've been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.
    - agentcoops 1y ago
      For me, it’s dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming state. Then I’m able to sort of “translate” the dream into language, which I remember—-and sometimes from there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn’t think I remembered. It’s still very rare for me and I’ll go years without remembering a single dream—-in fact, mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of the first areas where I learned my conscious experience was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        I don't recall ever waking up in a "half-dreaming state".
    - godelski 1y ago
      Focus real hard and make it a practice. You'll need to try every night. Most importantly, have patience. I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly. @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps. Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that is likely going to be the best time. But you really need to want to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep it. I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and illegible. It's better to start writing illegible nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come with time. Just write down anything you can remember. A color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself that this is important to remember. Just like taking notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act of note taking helps build that mental pathway. Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it took me a week to just recall a color. That's not abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing, then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60 minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error might help. You're targeting the last or second to last cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is probably better to start there, try to time it with your normal alarm. [0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it is harder for you, which might be a thing given your condition.
- agentcoops 1y ago
  Same—including the time I dabbled in “experience altering” compounds when much younger. I always find it so strange that many people, including in this thread, find the presence of language in their inner experience unsettling or “imperfect”—-I really wouldn’t trade my inner monologue for anything…
  - quacked 1y ago
    Can you type out some of your inner monologue? I don't have one. I can't imagine what it would even say.
yapyap 1y ago
It’s odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles. But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.
- agentcoops 1y ago
  It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that? It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.
_ink_ 1y ago
If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.
agentcoops 1y ago
Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It’s ironic because I’ve always had really good (better than 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words. The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year. One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc. [1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.

Citizen_Lame 1y ago

Not the guy you are asking, but when I close eyes there is only black. If try to imagine let's say apple, maybe it's there at opacity of 0.5% or less. But requires mental effort. No inner monologue as well. Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.

bored 1y ago
What is your experience of thinking? Sounds like it’s a black box to you

vidarh 1y ago

I dream in images but have only once in my life seen anything but darkness or vague abstract patterns with no connection to imagery with my eyes closed in a waking state. I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow. But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.

godelski 1y ago
> I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow. FWIW, this gets better after practice
- vidarh 1y ago
  How? I've tried writing it down many times over the years, but never recalled anything by the time I've been able to pick up anything to write with. Not a word.
  - agentcoops 1y ago
    For me, it’s dependent on waking up in a half-dreaming state. Then I’m able to sort of “translate” the dream into language, which I remember—-and sometimes from there I can get back to parts of the dream I didn’t think I remembered. It’s still very rare for me and I’ll go years without remembering a single dream—-in fact, mentioning this to friends when I was younger was one of the first areas where I learned my conscious experience was so different. I imagine getting better at it would be similar to getting better at lucid dreaming.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      I don't recall ever waking up in a "half-dreaming state".
  - godelski 1y ago
    Focus real hard and make it a practice. You'll need to try every night. Most importantly, have patience. I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly. @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps. Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that is likely going to be the best time. But you really need to want to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep it. I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and illegible. It's better to start writing illegible nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come with time. Just write down anything you can remember. A color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself that this is important to remember. Just like taking notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act of note taking helps build that mental pathway. Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it took me a week to just recall a color. That's not abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing, then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60 minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error might help. You're targeting the last or second to last cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is probably better to start there, try to time it with your normal alarm. [0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it is harder for you, which might be a thing given your condition.
agentcoops 1y ago
Same—including the time I dabbled in “experience altering” compounds when much younger. I always find it so strange that many people, including in this thread, find the presence of language in their inner experience unsettling or “imperfect”—-I really wouldn’t trade my inner monologue for anything…
- quacked 1y ago
  Can you type out some of your inner monologue? I don't have one. I can't imagine what it would even say.

yapyap 1y ago

It’s odd, I experience aphantasia in the way that I am a words thinker, able to talk with myself, the whole 5 miles. But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.

agentcoops 1y ago
It’s the same for me and every other aphantasic I’ve spoken with. I go years and years without remembering dreams, but there are distinct periods in my life when I remembered them often. For me it’s essentially if I wake up in a dreaming state and can quickly “translate” them into language. Strange to describe, but I do have a very distinct experience of dejavu sometimes, which I’ve come to believe is tied to latent dream memories—curious if you have anything like that? It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.

_ink_ 1y ago

If I close my eyes I see the inner of my eye lids. Interestingly very intense visual stimuli can trigger mental images for me. I remember that when I closed my eyes after endless hours of Counterstrike, I would still see the game, tho I couldn't control what I see. Same goes for porn. Sometimes I remember my dreams, which are visual, but I don't think that I experience any other sense while dreaming. As kid I had lucid dreams, which I was stunned of, because of the amount of details I remembered. I just looked at faces of people I knew. Lucid dreaming is still something which I want to try to train.

agentcoops 1y ago

Like many other aphantasics below, just my eyelids. It’s ironic because I’ve always had really good (better than 20:20) eyesight, but I can only remember words. The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year. One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc. [1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.