aphantasia
So there's a thing that happened to me once. I was back home visiting family, talking to my sister's ex husband (back before he became her ex husband)--one of those long rambling late night conversations that felt profound at the time but about which I have since completely forgotten every fact except that it happened--and for a little while I stopped having aphantasia.1
This was accompanied, as I recall, by, when I closed my eyes, seeing, instead of the normal entropic pattern of black and red, a faint grid of little red lines on the more expected "eyes closed" backdrop. And I could see things, mental images, very vividly. It was such a striking experience I've put it in a few stories, with some details changed, some others added; it's a nice story to have a character relate when they need to seem a little unstable, talk about paralyzing anxiety and existential crises, but honestly while it was a little alarming, it was mostly weird.
(I was, it must be said, stone cold sober. I don't think I'd even had any caffeine that day. People always ask.)
And something has started happening recently where sometimes, when I'm lying in bed struggling to sleep, I see flashes, images starting to form where they really shouldn't be able to--sometimes brief and bright, sometimes something dull and lingering. One wonders if perhaps it's something like lucid dreaming, or perhaps some product of the sleep-deprived mind. Or perhaps the way we think, the things we consider core to our identities, aren't actually immutable facets of our selves after all. How do we learn to think? Is it possible to just not train that part of your mind that forms pictures?
I'm thinking of a Hank Green video I saw recently where he talked about inner monologues, and how he doesn't have one. What struck me about that video at the time was that he said he remembered that he used to have one, and stopped at some point. Another example, perhaps, of the fact that there is very little about the constructs we call ourselves that is immutable.
Aphantasia is one of those things I only learned the word for a few years ago, but I've known I've had for as long as I can remember. It is, in brief, the lack of a visual imagination--when I close my eyes and "picture" an apple, I don't see anything. It's not really an inconvenience or anything (the only lasting impact it's had on me is I let it discourage me from ever trying to learn how to draw when I was young); it's just how my mind works.↩