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.
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.
My mind's eye doesn't care whether my eyes are open or closed. I can copy things back and forth between "reality" and "internal reality" quite seamlessly, so I can either keep my eyes open and bring things from my mind out into reality, or I can close my eyes and bring things from reality into internal reality. I don't strictly speaking have to close my eyes for the second one, but for example if I need to picture the room I'm in from another angle, but it's an inappropriate time to move from my seat, I can just copy the whole room into my mind, either close my eyes or unfocus and ignore my eyesight for awhile, and move things around inside my head. If there's a lot going in in the room, it's sometimes easier if I actually close them so I can spin the room around to the perspective I need.
Yeah also same. But I'm trying to clarify for a lot of people who think they don't visualize because the bar is set where they think that they have to close their eyes in order to visualize things.
This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.
I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was a kid, I was asked “how do you read so fast?” often and I would always proudly report than I can scan paragraphs and filter out the useless ones without reading them.
For example, I was reading some Pratchett and noticed that I had no idea how the protagonist ended up on a cliff (?). And then realized that I had automatically skipped the paragraph that talked about the cliff ascent, because it was “just a scenery description” and therefore useless.
I also remember having a long argument with my ex-girlfriend about the style of journalism where articles start like “I entered a small, dimly-lit room and Mr Brown, age 53, stood up from his massive oak desk and [blah blah blah]”. Like, this is all just fluff, I want to know what Mr Brown says and thinks and that’s all. I didn’t realize people might actually imagine the scene and enjoy it.
Going back to books — I think I care about how the book sounds more than I care about the plot or the vibe. I loved Lolita solely because the narrator was constantly playing with words, for example.
Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book.
To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
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.
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.
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.
