Posts
Comments
I stumbled across this thread randomly trying to look up this very information.
I have pretty much no visual imagination at all, with my eyes closed I see no shapes, no movement, not even colour. On Mark's Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire I am 5s all the way down. Close to sleep or in meditation at best I get faint movement, like very dim "white" light. I can however weigh in on some things.
I draw quite well, to the extent that I can draw portraits that look very much like the person, despite the fact that I can't see their face at all in my mind's eye. For a long time I had an irrational fear that I wouldn't recognize someone I knew well when I was going to meet them cause I couldn't picture their face, of course I always did. And I don't confuse people at all, but I do have a terrible memory for faces and sometimes need to meet a person more than once to be able to recognize them readily.
I can recall and even have lucid dreams. I'm not good at lucid dreaming. I've been trying off and on for years, and fairly intensely for the past year, but have only had a handful, 4 to be precise. My dream recall however is quite good, but I remember the narrative more than the visuals. Interestingly though, remembering dreams is the closest I get to seeing with my mind's eye, but it is fleeting and comes in flashes, and then nothing.
I have an excellent sense of direction and never get lost. Going somewhere once is enough for me to remember how to get there, but I don't have a visual mental map, it's more like sensing movement in different directions. It's more kinesthetic than visual. I sense a direction, then sense which way to turn ect... I'm also quite good at those shape orientation tests, where you are given an usual shape and have to match it with it in a different position in a line up of similar looking shapes.
I often feel as though it's not that I'm incapable of holding a mental image, it's just that I think it is a subconscious process for me, so that even though I can't actively imagine a friend's face, a visual map, or a rotated shape, somewhere below my awareness I in fact do "see" it and the information bubbles up when needed. I really want to see if I can learn to consciously create and experience a mental image, and I discovered one trick that gets me closer than anything else I've tried.
I can't visualize an apple on command, but if i'm looking at the colour red, sometimes I can picture an apple, or if I look at the colour green, sometimes I can visualize grass. The act of looking at the colour seems to be like a scaffold on which I can build a mental image. I'm hoping with practice this could lead to seeing it without the colour stimulus.