I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.
My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.
It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.
One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.
After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.
It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.
I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.
Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!
I'm not aphantasic, but that's exactly the experience I get when coming out of a lucid dream. Except it's my expected surroundings not black. Gets a bit weird and inceptiony when it's the wrong surroundings! Given the number of cultural references along these lines, I suspect it's not uncommon.
Focus takes training, just like physical exercise, it is a super power to be harnessed.
You can train yourself up by looking at your hand, then building a body, then building a room, and maintaining all of it. When you are strong enough, you walk outside.
I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.
In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.
I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)
FWIW I’m exactly like you. My ability to replay music sometimes surprises me.
Sometimes I’ll hear a song on the radio I haven’t heard in decades and be able to anticipate tiny details precisely (like, “here’s where the harmonica comes in in Karma Chameleon” or “here’s where the fretless bass is gonna bend a note”. You?
Just as sound, not language. When hearing sing in my head I’ll hear the little details. When listening to song on radio I’ll know when those details are coming, even if I haven’t heard the song in ages.
I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.
I have dreamed visually, sometimes vividly, but not so common these days that I awake remembering a dream. Lucid dreams rarely - and almost exclusively as a flying dream, like at some point I just realise I can fly and then I'm in control for a while until I wake up. Fun when it happens but I have no idea or technique for making it happen.
When falling asleep I can have random visuals but I can't control them, and trying to do so tends to kill them off.
Yeah it does feel somewhat like the rational and external sensory processing parts of my brain are maybe suppressing the inner-generated imagery.
I feel like when asked to 'imagine an apple', some part of my brain is sort of visualising an apple, I just can't "see" it. In other threads about aphantasia, normies have wondered how we enjoy reading. But I have always loved reading fiction and, like with the apple, I get absorbed in the book and am imagining it in some sense, just not 'seeing' it.
When you express you have aphantasia to someone, one of the most common questions is whether you can dream. As someone with it: Yes I can dream. They're so real they are lifelike. And not just visually. In my dreams, reality and history itself can be different and to me, history didn't change. It just is.
I rememeber in one dream I was some sort of captain and I saw one of my closest friends. We'd been crewmates for the past 40 years and I remember all my memories with him and why I trusted him with my life. I was 22 when I had the dream.
That's fascinating. Do you gain access to facts or knowledge that are verifiable afterwards? Have you ever become fluent in a foreign language for a dream?
Within the confines of the dream? Yes? Outside of the dream? Once I'm awake it feels real for a moment but quickly snaps back that it was all fictitious
In my experience, it feels real but the feelings doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It's more like the set of a play than a real world, where a thin facade evokes all the right cues in the audience but couldn't actually be used to trick someone into thinking it's real.
I don't have aphantasia but I sometimes also have dreams that are so realistic that when I wake up I feel as if it was some type of alternative reality. In some cases it is also as if I am watching a "movie" where the life I am experiencing is not my own, but I will still know each person.
It is a good question because aphantasics that can dream normally are far less likely to engage in the sort of "aphantasia is just semantics" denalism that is largely disproven given modern science and online discourse. I.e. it is a very strong credibility signal that what follows is not just cope / self-delusion, but actually potentially useful and interesting self-report.
I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.
Interesting that you say you had no visuals from LSD. How high a dose?
It's surprising to me, because as far as I understand it, psychedelic visuals aren't really akin to daydreams or internally generated imagery, but abnormal processing of external imagery. At least for relatively mild experiences. Something like a DMT breakthrough is a whole other story from what I hear, though I've never been there myself.
That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the highest I went for was about 4-500ug (according to the vendor, it was on a postal stamp so there can be quite some variance). I was exploring psychedelics several months in a row while increasing the dose, so there might have been some tolerance buildup. And it wasn't that I had no visuals at all - juar there was nothing visually profound, just some things shifting and moving here and there, people outside looking a bit strange, etc. Felt more like strange, weird drunkenness than anything. It was not at at all an uninteresting experience - just extremely cerebral. I tried DMT several times by the way, but couldn't break through - it gets very scary very fast, and the taste is like smoking a plastic bag, which was in itself quite off-putting.
I'm also aphantasic, but I do dream, though rarely remember them unless I wake up and go back to sleep (probably due to being a deep sleeper rather than anything to do with aphantasia). At most I get some attraction to and diffusion of (not sure how to describe this experience) fractal patterns and vibrant colors on LSD. On shrooms I've gotten some color-shifting of lights, but no open or closed-eye visualization or hallucination. Strong opiates have given me closed-eye hallucination (uncontrollable visualization) though.
How’s your sleep quality? I (aphantasic) only ever dream on weekends when I sleep in over 8 hours (rare), and having to get up to pee after 4 hours also cuts in.
Depends on the coffee intake and stress; when I am on vacation, I sleep 7-8 hours without waking up. I am lucky that I don't need to pee during the night, though.
So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)
"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.
I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.
I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.
Question for visualizers: is imagery held steady in your dream, or does it constantly shift and morph?
I’m aphantasic and like I’ve seen many people report here, I can kinda almost conjure up images but can’t hold them steady even for a microsecond. It immediately disintegrates and can’t be brought back.
In my dreams the imagery always shifts, but not in the same way. It’s held enough to be recognizable before changing into some other random nonsense like happens in dreams.
(I dreamt last night a StarCraft 2 YouTuber I follow was spamming raven auto-turrets over some people from a helicopter, which they shot down with a machine gun, and the youtuber survived the crash but he didn’t look at all like himself and that confused me, but we were in an Italian castle, and I was hiding from gangsters, but my boss had traveled to Italy and we were in a hospital where he was getting “torso reduction” and I put my hand on the small of his back, and it was my wife)
Certain types of meditation training involve specifically this faculty - the ability to hold a particular image steady in the visual imagination. Having the ability to vividly imagine a visual scene or a simple geometric shape is very much a muscle which can be trained; the brain is very plastic in this regard.
In what way has it helped? Is the settling of the mind in open-awareness reducing competition and distraction, or are you doing something more akin to absorption / cultivation practices?
It's probably a good idea to reduce phone computing to a minimum. Also the larger phone will likely damage your vision to need glasses eventually but there are other ergonomic factors at play. Do you want to hold your phone with two hands? Doesn't it get tiring for wrists to hold the phone in the position? I personally reduced phone usage but am still using a SE2022 which is a small phone. For reading I got a e ink reader and Im very happy with that.
I've wanted something like this for a long time to print recipes that I'm about to cook. I don't want my phone in the kitchen getting gunk on it, so I'll usually print on paper, get the gunk on the paper, and then throw it out.
I'm not going to create a recipe PDF and load it on an e-reader. That's too much work. But I will happily press control-P on a recipe web page and select the eink display as the target.
I'm planning on doing something similar with a $150 treadmill that uses an app called "Gymax." I don't want the app or its adorably embryonic social network. I just want three buttons: slow, fast, and really fast for 60 seconds.
For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.
When you pay with Suica, the merchant pays a transaction fee of between 2 to 3.2%, similar to a credit card.
That's surprising. IC cards are so universally and cheerfully accepted that I assumed they had no per-transaction costs. Compare the US, where merchants can be surly about card payments.
There's a mindset difference. People are more willing to pay to reduce inconvenience for customers there, whereas here the inconvenience to the merchant sometimes matters more.
This simply isn't true, or you'd see these places accept credit cards.
The most prevalent mom & pop approach is either cash only or it's cash and PayPay. You may also see cash, PayPay and IC. PayPay, at first, had extremely low fees and an army of sales people that targeted mom & pops, pushing the low fees. They've since then increased fees as their saturation has increased, and now you'll see shops adding things like setapay or hachipay (which are annoyingly ku specific payment methods that are very low fee).
Larger businesses are owned by massive conglomerates, or are housed in shopping complexes owned by massive conglomerates that require them to accept more payment methods.
Like all businesses, they aim to reduce their costs and increase their margins. They aren't adding payment methods to reduce your inconvenience, unless they think doing so will increase their volume enough to offset the fees.
Attitudes depends on margin and cash-handling costs.
And prior to a 2013 class-action lawsuit that changed the situation, merchants were widely banned by payment processors from charging credit card transaction fees. But now many low margin businesses pass along the cost: for instance, it is common at gas stations, and almost universal at truck stops across the US. And some businesses have long opted for minimum transaction amount for credit purchases.
On the other hand, in places where the target clientele is fully-banked and handling cash is more costly, some businesses find it advantageous to opt solely for card transactions: for instance, an upscale establishment in a city. They may have higher margins that can easily eat the cost, and being card-only also decreases the attractiveness to robbers and discourages unbanked patrons. It has also been criticized for being discriminatory in the same way.
I agree with the article's conclusion (though I don't think much of the reasoning that got it there). But I do think we should consider granting additional privileges to real humans as they interact with LLMs.
Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant?
Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well?
I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were.
*It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.
One small thing to try is so-called Asian squats while you're playing with your kid.
Hip and groin neuralgia started suspiciously soon after my tirzepatide weight loss. I seem to have gotten it under control after mobility exercises centered around squatting. It took almost six months to get from falling backwards to being able to squat flat-footed. Now it's a comfortable and useful stance.
My theory is the weight loss shifted my center of gravity, calling on muscles and joints that weren't ready for the load. Learning to squat helped the new version of my body relearn how to support itself.
The Asian squat has a very different focus than the squats I do in the gym. In the gym, a barbell back squat puts 200+ lb of weight on my shoulder, I squat down, hold for one second and then come up. In contrast the Asian squat needs no weight, but I need to stay at the bottom position for many seconds. It most likely exercises muscles in a different way than my usual squats. I can hardly do the Asian squats because I don’t practice holding at the bottom position.
The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.
I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.
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