Aphantasia – versus, visualising your story with your ‘minds eye’.

[XerXesXu]

XerXesXu first asks a question about describing visualization by naming a condition where someone cannot visualize.

He then claims any descriptions of a mind's eye experience is merely hyperbole or the author using poetic license. His logic is you can't see a smell, or that a map contour interval of 20m cannot be used to visualize the spot he found with square miles of swamp. Could it be there exists a spot so flat that it is 2-D? And he then says that I claim I could navigate around a billiard ball by visualization.

Interesting exaggerations. But then, he is an author ... in his mind's eye.

Your imagination's more vivid than your visualisation. That's not a bad thing, just different.

 

[DukeStone]

I was fascinated by this article (H/T the passivevoice.com):

Aphantasia: Writing Fiction With No ‘Mind’s Eye’ – Writer Unboxed

I’ve often been fascinated by the way posters here, describe their experiences of reading and writing, and wondered whether there was an element of hyperbole involved. I ‘know’, but I don’t ‘see with my mind’s eye’. Nor do I remember dreams. I’m just wondering how intensely others experience visualisation when reading or writing creatively and how important it is to them.

I suffer? From it. I imagine in words not visualizations. Strangely though I dream in movie quality scenes. I've managed to write 4 novels and dozens of short stories and poems so I font think it does me any. It's really just a matter of what you grow accustomed too.

 

[LdyHoneybee]

Yes i see them doing things and I see places, animals, but not faces. I know eye color and hair color, body shape and size but the FACE is blurred. Sometimes I see an actor or actress who could “play” a character, but that is as close as it gets and is not only about appearance. I “hear” words.

 

[LupusDei]

Quite. My query isn't about the experience of recall or recognition - the processing of given information. It's about creative visualisation. I don't recall dreams, but I know I dream, I know dreams are visual and I know that the settings of the dreams, the characters in the dreams, and the behaviour of those characters are out of the control of the dreamer. Sometimes people appear to me to describe their experience of story creation being like that. That's not my experience. Do some writers have a dream-like experience, with accompanying visual imagery, when creating fictitious stories.

My understanding is that yes, indeed, some writers do have a full on dream like experience while writing where they can lose control of their characters and actions unfolding.

I'm not a writer... at least not in the sense I have published any fiction. But I do experiment with writing, and some other media creating, like graphic novels, although I don't think I can draw as well or anyhow nearly as fast I would like to see it worthwhile, and when I shift through that archive, it's obvious I often do some of the same images again and again even if decorated with claims of different circumstances.

And that's how the most brutally intentional storytelling would likely mostly go too, as more a narrative driven constructions based on the anchor slides as intermediate waypoints. A set of imaginary images that then gain movement, then I speculate about emotion of the people in the scene (just like I have to constantly do, without the ability to judge people's mental states most others seem to possess naturally somehow), then invent motivation that could led them there. Then I would go and try to figure out what needs to happen to get from one such wanted slide to another, without precluding way to the next too much.

Nothing of that involved any words at all so far. Trying to figure out the words is the last and worst task, hard and thankless work I may not even like, but some stories want to be written no matter what.

I struggle to describe my own experiences in words even in my native language, but my experiments with writing -- particularly, in this site's context -- are being done in a foreign language. Trying to middle in my native language is less than helpful, actually actively detrimental, because things that simply don't translate. I have learned four languages and can use three, and each has words and concepts that are exclusive to that language. Even those that may, somewhat, can have wastly different etymologies.

Like, relevant to this discussion, the English word "imagination" prescribe visualization, while the closest corresponding word in my native language (iztēle) is a construct build around a stem from a verb (tēlot) that has "play a role" as the most basic meaning. Then, even the word for "image" (attēls) is built on the same, and faithful direct transfer would just as well yield something like "re-play" although the word is used exclusively for static flat... yes, "representation" is perhaps closest to it, but going back from the scope of "representation" I would rather pick simply the noun form of the base verb (tēls) with then has "statue" as the default association, but can be used for much more blurred things like an unclear vision in the mist, or as well for discussion upon "character" in a literary work or even other important aspects of it, like discussing how a city or country is portrayed.

So words are very confusing, but when non-visual imagination is discussed, my native language might possibly be more tolerant and forgiving, or I may just lack the relevant vocabulary in English, just like I gravely lack vocabulary to discuss clothing, made worse by lacking finest edges of that vocabulary even in my native language, just like I, living close to nature, do distinguish hundreds of different flowers and weeds but can only confidently name just few, and even some of those would perhaps do so wrongly.

Myself, I'm exceedingly visual in my own mind. Thinking about a problem, even abstract problem like in computer code, I may imagine it as a set of geometric shapes, or patterns, even in D>3 if necessary. To possibly explain or draw those representations I would have to down-project those to movement or color, but while no language is involved I don't have to as long it is just internal tool for myself.

Extremely visually inclined I have almost phobia level fear of losing my eyesight, and to combat that have done what I can to convince myself I could overcome such, and thus I have learned to navigate most of my environments with eyes closed.

As frequent lucid dreamer I have experimented with visual-less dreams as well, and some such have happened on their own. Like,

...once in a half-asleep nightmare during sickness I was an earthquake and my efforts to preserve the city built atop my blanket were futile; as an earthquake I didn't even see the city, just felt it crumbling.

But mostly, my dreams are visual, I would even say some of most striking and impressive visual experiences have been dreamscapes, ranging from full movie-escue narrative experiences to absurd chaos, like,

...sitting in a never before seen living room that had seashore with a beach, on couch I talked with a female cardboard cutout cartoon mouse who, not changing her appearance was some else every few sentences of our conversation, shifting through relatives, girlfriends and other women while above the couch was an artwork in with a cauldron of jam was boiling, and at some point that cauldron was toppled and the boiling jam flowed dow over us as an alien organism... ending any pretense of sense.

At the other end would be whole novel worthy narrated dreams, like,

...a freelance detective riding his flying motorcycle into the sunset over the otherworldly city filled with impressive interlinked megastructures after solving what he could about the mysterious death of parents of twin girls (one of with was a recurring alternative viewpoint) much too deeply involved in the intrigue of the city's underground aristocracy.

Lucid dreaming is fragile, too much willpower, especially in altering other character actions or appearance can break the dream down, but staying within the magic of allowed can advance them in interesting, sometimes unexpected ways.

...I dragged her away from the soldiers and up a pole in the middle of an arena cheering her imminent lynching. Distracted by the warmth of her exposed skin touching mine and the scent of her hair, I planning a futile battle out from that corner. Review of options revealed inconsistencies letting me recognize that I'm dreaming and so I decided to simply fly away with my willing prey. Some strange magic had put a ceiling on my flying altitude though, just under the top of the outer wall of the arena. So I dragged us right through it, entering a single brick wide vent at first, but when that led nowhere either, continuing in a straight line through the wall itself, vividly observing every atom of the crystal structure of that stone on the way. The sprawling middle east -escue city that emerged under us once we soared to the sky out of the wall I haven't ever seen otherwise either, but didn't pay much attention to it engulfed in the ecstatic happiness of my partner as we merged between the clouds.

Dreams are fictitious stories created out of my own mind; any evidence to the contrary is less than convincing.

And I often do daydreaming, even it may not be a vivid, as mostly I would have to redirect part of my attention to some other activities (like, monotonous physical labor), and the conscious structuring may come in the way of pure movie like experience. Still, yes, the ideal of storytelling for me would be to stream such a daydream as it happens. Unfortunately there's too many technical layers that break that ideal, especially when the media is so limited as a written word in a foreign language.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Just an example I guess, but I ran into this image when I was doing a search and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was a story and I had a pretty good idea of what the story was....

 

[Imstillfun]

I visualize the entire story, characters faces, color schemes in surroundings. I picture everything.

often I picture a scene and then write the story around it. But it all comes to life in my mind.

 

[XerXesXu]

I was fascinated by this article (H/T the passivevoice.com):

Aphantasia: Writing Fiction With No ‘Mind’s Eye’ – Writer Unboxed

I’ve often been fascinated by the way posters here, describe their experiences of reading and writing, and wondered whether there was an element of hyperbole involved. I ‘know’, but I don’t ‘see with my mind’s eye’. Nor do I remember dreams. I’m just wondering how intensely others experience visualisation when reading or writing creatively and how important it is to them.

Another interesting article that casts some light on the matter.

The education system is screening out visual thinkers