Mental Intensities

A silent mind.

I am recently aware of the fact that I am aphantasic. This means that I cannot generate a mental image, at least consciously.

I dream like a mad thing. I have super-vivid dreams that I can recall in great detail at the start of the day, but then vanish over time. In the end, what I am left with is the lingering sense or emotion that the dream I remember clearest has elicited in me.

Only recently did I learn that this was something that was not common. Up until recently, I thought there was nothing odd in the fact that I could not remember important images. I could remember the detail. I can still recall how my daughter came out with a cheeky face, licking her lips the day she was born. I can’t actually see. I just know that this was something I noted in that moment.

I thought there was nothing odd in the fact that I cannot call to mind the image of the view I saw every day as I looked out my bedroom window. I know the details. The houses are lined up like a row, that one of the houses has a large square bedroom window. That there was an airfield in the far distance with an orange airsock, and on the otherside there was a mushroom shaped copse of trees on the top of a hill.

But if I try to see it in my head, I can’t.

No, up until recently, I thought that was how everyone else remembered things. Not seeing the moments, places and people. But recalling details.

Like, the day I learned that my Da had ALS, I remember meeting up with my wife’s father, stepmother, and half-sister Anna, who is one of my favourite people ever. Anna brought her daughter and her dog. I remember the details of that day that I noted carefully, like how, at one point during the picnic, as I lay on a blanket stretching my leg which had a clot out, the dog came over and looked at me, then dropped beside me and snuggled into my before hoping up and running off again.

But if I tried to think about it and call the image of the event to mind. I draw a blank. I literally cannot do it.

When I learned that this is not normal, and that most others can see people they love, and places they have been, and other visual images in their mind, I began experimenting. Even trying to do that with objects, places and people that are right in front of me and each time. I have failed.

All of this comes in the week that I learned that my not hearing an internal monologue or my voice in my head as I read, was again something that was not the norm, though this is more common than it may seem, so I am kind of reeling a little.

So what does it mean?