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I'm aphantasic - I do not and cannot create pictures in my mind's eye. My mind does not have an eye. But there have been just a few times very recently where in the first moments upon waking in the morning, there's an image in my mind and I feel like I can SEE it. Like, see it see it! As if I were looking at it with my eyes! It always vanishes within a few moments, but my god, is that a glimpse into what it's like to NOT be aphantasic??

Now, though, I'm wondering which of several things is true:

1. Am I weirdly suddenly able to access a tiny amount of picturing things, out of nowhere?

Or

2. Is the dreamy confusion of waking up making me *feel* like I'm picturing things but not *actually* picturing things? It lasts so briefly that I actually can't be sure!

Or

3. Have I always genuinely able to picture things in my sleep, but not awake, but because I only conscsiously experience dreams through the medium of remembering them, I've never been able to tell that - and a change in recent sleeping habits means I have been holding on to a snatch of a dream just long enough to get the sense of it with my waking mind?

Or something else????

Anyway these brief snatches of mind-pictures have been a baffling thing to experience, as something I've never previously been able to do in my life ever, and all of a sudden I'm a little more of a true believer that other people DO do this thing all the time!

It always seemed so fake to me before. So made up. How could a person PICTURE things?! That's just a metaphor, surely! We're using words about images to describe the experience of thinking about a thing, because the actual experience of thinking is so unlike anything in the physical world that there are no words to describe it! Right? Right????

I guess for lots of people, they literally are creating pictures in their head with their brains, all the time.

WILD.

Now I really wish I had a better way to explain what my experience of thinking is like, tbh. Because all I have is metaphor, to translate it into words! But those metaphors are apparently concrete factual experiences to other people, so I won't be successfully communicating!

This is similar to my experience with words, btw. I *can* think in words, more than I can with pictures, but that's me deliberately creating the words and sentences. I'm translating my thoughts into words with conscious effort.

My thoughts aren't words. My thoughts aren't pictures. My thoughts are thoughts!

How are so many people's thoughts NOT just thoughts!