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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Honest questions:

Do people with Aphantasia dream vivid dreams with images?

How about masturbation without visual input? Are you not capable of visually imagining something arousing, like a person you find very attractive etc?

I don’t _think_ I suffer from it but would call the images in my head very clear or detailed or very accurate.

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I'm nearly completely aphantasic. I can get very brief flashes of images but can't make them happen nor hold them in my mind.

I almost never dream. When I do dream it's fairly lifelike.

I can't visualize anything arousing. When I first learned (at 26!) that my friends can visualize any fantasy at will I was floored. I have zero internal imagery for anything sexual. Have no fantasies.

I can't picture anyone's face. Bodies are only experienced in person. If I can't see it with my eyes, it doesn't exist.

I'm completely aphantasiac across all senses. I can't mentally visualize, mentally have song stuck in my head, imagine taste/touch/etc. I still dream frequently. Dreaming and lack of awake mental visualization are separate. There are people who lack both but you can dream visually frequently while being completely unable to have any visual imagination awake.

I never remember my dreams, and I suspect I'm aphantasic. As far as I'm concerned, 99.something% of my sleep follows the pattern of fall asleep -> void outside of time -> wake up.

There are extremely rare fleeting moments where I might wake up and remember some details about a dream for a few seconds, but then I lose it. Those would be counted on one hand per year, easily.

I think these things are a spectrum and I wouldn’t really say I experience it either, but my dreams have only rarely really felt visual, much more like a story or a narrative, which is also how my memories normally feel

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