[satvikpendem]

Why would I use a low fidelity version when I can just recall a high fidelity version directly in my mind? You too can achieve this by training dream recall, by keeping a dream journal for example. After a while you will notice you can remember nearly everything about dreams and will start lucid dreaming as well.

[irishcoffee]

I was in college before I realized this wasn’t a universal thing. 15 years later I was finally exposed to the bit where some people don’t have an inner monologue or a minds eye.

I wonder if they’re related.

[matthewsinclair]

Hello from the other side!

I was about 45 before I realised that when people said “in my mind’s eye” it was substantially more than a metaphor.

And it wasn’t until about a year later that I realised that I also didn’t have what ordinary people refer to as an inner monologue.

Realising that I had both aphantasia and anendophasia was quite a shock, but has never felt to me like I was missing anything.

For images I literally have nothing “pictorial” or “graphical” at all, but concepts and relationships are “vivid”. And for the inner monologue, there’s no autonomic voice at all, but if I concentrate in the same way that someone might “consciously breathe” I can kinda sorta trigger something.

Interestingly, in periods where I have meditated for >20min per day for consecutive weeks, I can trigger what I refer to as “flyover mode” which is like a literal landscape flyover that feels like a 4K screensaver. But this is _rare_ and requires a huge amount of effort.

Weird, eh!?

[irishcoffee]

Oh hi! Do you have vivid dreams??

I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I generally have extremely vivid dreams. I also have a very active inner-monologue and can do the whole “picture a red apple on a green lawn with 3 yellow dots on it, pick it up and rotate it and track the dots” kind of thing. As it happens I’m a visual learner and a voracious reader.

I’ve never thought about if any of this was connected before. I should do some research.

[matthewsinclair]

I have dreams, but they're almost always non-visual, at least in the traditional sense, or when compared to other people I know who recount their dreams to me, and I very rarely "remember" (if that's the right word) them in any detail. I sometimes (rarely) will have visual dreams, but that almost always happens after I've had a good night's sleep, woken up, and then fallen back to sleep again. I think it might have something to do with how deeply I sleep when I am asleep. A train could drive past my bed and I wouldn't wake up.

[fallinghawks]

I kept a dream journal for years and very rarely had lucid dreams. 6-8 times at most over 30 years. I definitely got better at remembering dreams -- it also helped if I could build a narrative that would keep the different segments tied together.

[satvikpendem]

For some people it's more natural, with DILD (dream induced lucid dreams) but others need to practice the skill explicitly, such as with WILD (wake induced lucid dreams) methods.

[ASalazarMX]

I find that my dreams start fading the more awake I am, unless they were more intense than usual. How do you keep that mental twilight long enough to write the details?

[satvikpendem]

Wake up and immediately start writing them down. Sometimes I use a voice recorder app to do the same, I believe there are apps out there for dream specific voice or text journaling but I just use my phone, used a physical journal previously. After a few weeks you'll be able to remember them fully.