When I close my eyes, all I see is darkness. 

It’s always been this way. 

I thought this was normal. When I was 22, I learned otherwise. 

I learned that “imagination” is not merely a figure of speech—people can actually see images in their heads. They can picture their dog wagging its tail or their mother smiling at them, or see a lover embracing them after being away for far too long.
 

But not me. All I see is darkness.
 

When I was 22, a friend recommended I read Tolkien’s The Hobbit. A week later after trudging through a few chapters, I frustratedly told her, “With its pages-long descriptions of the landscape, it feels like the author is trying to paint a picture with his words and I cannot see it.”

“Umm,” she replied, “I think you might have aphantasia.”

“Huh? What’s that?”

99% of people have imaginations—they close their eyes and they can see images. The other 1% don’t—we aphantasiacs see nothing but darkness.

Instead of seeing images, I think exclusively in terms of concepts. For example, I know what my dog looks like, but not from visualizing her in my mind. Instead, I can describe my dog by listing her characteristics stored in my memory—like I’m accessing words from a txt file.^[1]

Aphantasia is not a disease or a disorder; it’s just another variation of the human experience.

Months later that same friend asked me, “You never see images? Like ever?” She reflected for a moment. “Do you dream?”

“Of cour…” A feeling of consternation washed over me, softly awakening memories that were long forgotten.

“Actually…not anymore. I remember dreaming when I was a kid. But for the last ten years or so, I guess…my dreams disappeared and never came back.”

Dreaming is our subconscious’ way of working through unprocessed emotion we’ve been too busy to think about. For some reason, I got disconnected from this basic aspect of the human experience and never figured out why, until now.

The first clue came from when I vacationed in Panamá three years ago. I was staying in a cabin that was secluded in the mountains overlooking a river valley populated by a quaint, simple town. Unexpectedly, every night I experienced wildly intense dreams—some of them so vivid that I awoke in a cold sweat, my heart racing. After years of dreamlessness, I wondered if this happened because of the decision I had made when I arrived:

Upon unlocking the front door of the cabin, and before entering, I turned my phone on airplane mode. For a week straight I had no contact with friends, no texts, no emails, no buzzing. Peace. Quiet…

Too quiet?

During the day, the ceiling-tall windows of the cabin drank endless sunshine and overdosed on the majesty of the serene cloud forest below. As the sun faded beyond the horizon and the dark consumed the remaining streaks of golden fading light, a gentle wind began which steadily increased in voracity and ferocity as it accelerated into an insatiable torrent. Isolated on the top of a hill, the cabin was completely exposed to the assailing violent wind, whipping the windows endlessly causing reverberations that sounded like booming war drums. The assault continued for hours, resounding in occasional crescendos that roared so loud that the windows shook, seemingly on the verge of giving way.

I sat in the corner of the cabin, digging my fingernails into the arms of my chair,  trying but failing to concentrate on a book. Terror. True terror. The kind of terror that besets peasants when their castle is under siege by savage barbarians ready to rip their faces off.

Without my digital pacifier assuaging my regular microdoses of anxiety and uncertainty, I devolved into a more primal state of awareness—terror at the hands of nature.

I looked over at my travel partner and asked how they felt. “Huh?” They took an earbud out and paused their Netflix show. “Oh, the wind? Yeah it’s crazy man,” and they returned to their show, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

When I finally crawled into bed and succumbed to sleep, a dream visited me. 
 

Or, more accurately, a nightmare.

On subsequent vacations, I have similarly been barraged with midnight reveries. I assumed the dreams were happening because I was living in a new environment. 

But on my most recent vacation, I didn’t have a single dream. What was different this time was that I didn’t put my phone on airplane mode. Instead, I stayed plugged in, buzzing the nights away in the lulling, dulling, numbing blue light. Recognizing this, I returned home and performed an experiment.

Alone in my apartment four weeks ago, I turned my phone on airplane mode at 7pm. Normally I eat dinner with a screen glowing in front me, with various parasocial personalities keeping me company throughout the night. But that night I ate dinner alone, truly alone, with nothing but my thoughts.

A small bubbling feeling of anxiety gnawed on the edges of my stomach, but I ignored it, finished dinner, and sat in my armchair to read a novel. After what felt like hours, I got up and checked the clock on my nightstand—only thirty minutes had passed. I nervously paced my room, unsure what to do next. Then I opened the door to my balcony and stepped into the brisk November night. Blackness. Emptiness. Coldness. The kind of cold that reminded me that I was alone. I watched the traffic go by from five stories up—they looked like matchbox cars softly motoring along to go home, home to their families. Unlike me, who lives alone, and is alone. A heavy, lethargic feeling slowly suffused my cold, shivering body. In a dreary trance, I shuffled to my bed and pulled the covers over tightly. 
 

Sleep took me. 

Then…

I bolted awake, sweating.

I had experienced the most vivid dream: it was about a recent, disturbing event in my life that I had neglected to sit down and process yet. Assuming it was the morning, I got out of bed to journal about it at my kitchen table. After writing down all my thoughts, I glanced at my nightstand clock—2:08am. Oh.

For three nights in a row the same thing kept happening: I awoke in a sweat at 2am from emotionally intense dreams and I couldn’t go back to sleep for hours. And while I felt exhausted from the sleep deprivation, I was also exhilarated. Even if it was only while I was unconscious, for a brief time I got to see images—the part of the brain responsible for daytime imagery (which is dysfunctional in my brain) is separate from the part that produces dreams.

Eventually, as I maintained my new nighttime routine of ceasing all screen usage 1-2 hours before bed, my circadian rhythm adjusted, and I started sleeping through the whole night.
 

And the dreams just keep coming.

It was ten years ago that my dreams deserted me—about the time I got my first laptop and smartphone. Such a simple yet obvious explanation that I had overlooked.

But I’m not alone. 9 out of 10 Americans reportedly use electronic devices in the hour before bed. Exposure to blue light reduces the quantity and quality of REM sleep, which is when most of our vivid dreaming occurs, and when much of our emotional processing happens.

When I’m awake and I close my eyes, all I see is darkness. 

But now I’ve learned how to dream every night—the only time in my life I get to see mental imagery. The only time I get to feel like the rest of you 99%.
 

Good night.

1. ^{^}

   Researchers believe congenital aphantasia occurs due to reduced connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (which handles working memory) and the visual networks of the brain (which creates mental imagery for that working memory).