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People With Aphantasia Can’t Visualize Anything. So How Do They Dream?

Among the visual aphantasics in the study, 46% said they always dream in pictures.

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Close your eyes and picture a beach. For most people, you can “see” it in your mind—water, sand, sunshine. For around 3 to 4% of the population, however, no image appears. The mental screen stays blank, and many of them spent years assuming everyone else was speaking metaphorically when they said, “picture this.” That condition is called aphantasia, and what’s really weird: a lot of people who have it still dream in full color.

A new study published in Scientific Reports set out to explain that contradiction and came back with something more complicated than a single answer. Researchers from the University of Queensland and the University of Bonn surveyed 205 participants, 84 of them classified as visual aphantasics, asking them to rate how vividly their waking imagination worked........

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