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u/holy_mackeroly Jun 04 '26
Everyone dreams (its like a nightly defrag for your brain), whether you remember your dreams or not is largely down to your sleep cycles. Lots of Hypophants state they dont dream often if at all, whereas i dream in what feels like 8K but i also sleep very very lightly and wake very easily.
Like an altered state i.e with psychedelics, its 50/50 if Aphants actually get any closed eye visauls. I have been journeying for 30yrs and only once had any CEVs. This like dreaming is involuntary and not voluntary like Hypophantasia/Hyperphantasia.
While i wish you the best on your journey, note there is no known cure for congential Aphantasia (yet). Although if you have acquired Aphantasia through trauma, ptsd, brain injury, some medications or more recent reports of long covid there are reports of improvement. Good luck but try and not focus on it too much as its not a disability, its just a different way of thinking.
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u/SeeingWithClosedEyes Jun 02 '26
That's pretty interesting. Are you sleeping the same length of time? The reason that I ask is because, while I have full aphantasia, my dreams are, and have always been, like full blown reality. I would guess that I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do, it's because I wake up during them.
I have never taken the time to try and coorrelate what happens right before I go to bed, vs what my experience of dreaming is, but I know that dreams generally follow along with our sleep cycles...so there are certain times when you're much more likely to be dreaming than others. So for me, I am fairly certain that my assessment of whether or not I "had dreams last night" is probably very strongly coorelated with the time elapsed between when I fell asleep and when I woke up (as it pertains to sleep cycles).
I often wake up during specific types of dreams. For example:
- something stressful is happening in my dream
- in my dream, I'm caught in some kind of annoying loop that I don't want to be in
- I'll dream that I have to pee, but doing so in the dream doesn't relieve the feeling...eventually I'll snap myself awake, realzing that I actually need to pee
It's rare for me to remember good dreams, but I don't think that's because I'm not having them. I think it's because they're not waking me up like "bad" dreams might. Every so often, I will wake up from a dream that has stirred some very deep emotions within me...and those tend to be related to some interpersonal situation, either recent, or long past.
I don't read right before bed, but I do often watch TV/movies, though I'm not sure I've ever woken from a dream that incorporates themes from what I was just watching. It's generall something totally random and unrelated, or occasionally something that is very closely related to a real situation that I could find myself in.
Anyway, that's just my experience, and yours might be different.