I ask because there's done research suggesting visual hallucinations while sleeping helps maintain the visual cortex's proficiency. IIRC it was just contingent on visual stimuli. Sometimes as I fall asleep I see a very bright white light, so something like that can count.
If you don't remember your dreams it might be interesting to keep a dream journal. It might take awhile to get your first entry. I kept one a decade ago and my first entry was "I remember but color blue" and it took a week. But even though I don't keep it anymore I remember most of my dreams and they are still quite vivid. Might be a fun experiment
The dreaming question is really fascinating: it doesn’t seem to be impacted in its essence by all the incredibly diverse structures of inner experience. It’s clearly a function of the brain much older than conscious experience [1] and I’ve also read research supporting its necessary role in learning (roughly equivalent to reinforcement learning on synthetic data). There are very rare periods in my life when I’ve remembered my dreams often—-which definitely suggests it’s a skill I could refine—-but generally I recall one or two a year.
One of the interesting questions is which properties of inner experience are genetic, which early developmental, and which skills one can refine at any point in life. Before I knew I was aphantasic, I had a phase studying chess and I tried so hard to “get better” at visualizing games—-one of the most frustrating experiences of my life! Knowing one’s limitations, you can then refine appropriate techniques like algebraic representations etc.
[1] GPT found some terrific papers on this question. In fact, dreaming (measured by two-phase REM sleep cycles) goes back to vertebrates — and seems to have been convergently evolved in insects and cephalopods. Jellyfish appear as the limit with only a single sleep phase. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06203-4 is fascinating.
But I am also able to have very vivid dreams, given that I sleep at the right time, around 22:00 - 24:00 and being sufficiently tired also seems to help. They seem very real when I am dreaming them but when I wake up I can remember the thoughts of imagery but can’t recall any real images or pictures or visual recollection except that I seem to have had them in the moment.
It’s actually something very interesting about the function of dreaming in the brain that this is the case. That there’s such insane variability in the structure of conscious experience and memory, but the imagistic quality of dreaming fulfills a necessary role for all. I’ve read reputable studies that suggest it’s crucial for learning, something similar to training on synthetic data.
I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.
But I have a persistent inner monologue that only ever stops with effort when I sit down to meditate.
> I don't remember my dreams longer than a few seconds after waking up. Just reaching for a pen would be too slow.
I started like you. Basically it disappeared instantly. @agentcoops is right that the still sleepy state helps. Your last few sleep cycles have the longest REM, so that is likely going to be the best time. But you really need to want to do it. By turning it into a habit your brain will start recognizing that it is important, so to keep it.
I highly suggest using pen and paper. Do not write on your phone. It'll help with maintaining that sleepy state. It's okay if they are just scribbles and illegible. It's better to start writing illegible nonsense than waking up and making it readable. This is especially true in the beginning. It's okay, it'll come with time. Just write down anything you can remember. A color, feeling, emotion, smell, taste, or anything. You can help the habit by writing "nothing" in it, just as a note to remind your mind that you're trying. I cannot stress the importance of the habit. The real reason the dream journal works is because you are teaching yourself that this is important to remember. Just like taking notes in class. Even if you never read them back, the act of note taking helps build that mental pathway.
Honestly, it may take a month (or more if you're really "bad"[0]) to write your first full dream. But you should be able to get something in a week or two. Remember, it took me a week to just recall a color. That's not abnormal. If after a few weeks you still have nothing, then set two alarms in the morning an hour or two before you normally wake up. The alarms should be about 45-60 minutes from the first. What you're trying to do is wake yourself up towards the end of REM, so trial and error might help. You're targeting the last or second to last cycle. But there's 2 reasons I suggest not starting there. 1) You haven't built the habit yet, so it's going to be less useful. 2) Disrupting REM leads you to feeling less rested, even if you got enough hours. You can also get less reliable results with a single alarm and it is probably better to start there, try to time it with your normal alarm.
[0] Not that you are doing anything wrong. Just that it is harder for you, which might be a thing given your condition.
Dreams on the other hand are very vivid, sometimes I feel like I am physically there so I can smell, feel cold etc.
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
I don't.
When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated videos where the details are constantly morphing and shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I simply can’t hold onto a single still visualization for more than a second.
So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)
Likewise. It even happens even with the people I know in detail such as family. If I try to project the image of my own son in my minds eye it is not clear and is always shifting, it's more of a feeling than a clear picture. Once, when I was a teenager, I was mugged and when at the police precinct they showed me a booklet with the common offenders in the area. After a few pages I could not remember what my mugger looked like. Always wondered how people manage to rebuild sketches of offenders not knowing as an aphantasiac it's nearly impossible.
Without discussing this and understanding how processing can truly differ like that I could go a lifetime wondering how people can read fiction etc, and how is it possible that I don't get what they are getting. I wonder if some drugs might allow me to get the same out of fiction books.
Another discouraging note from school times was that whenever I tried myself to read the mandatory literature fully myself, and formed my own conclusions I got bad grades and no one understood what I was getting at or what my conclusions were about, but when I just read summaries and conclusions on the Internet it was easy to get perfect grades. Too many of those things during school which made me feel delusional/crazy. Oh well. The rant went off-topic, but I just have I guess "vivid" memories of how school affected me emotionally in terms of self esteem and confidence. I remember just having my own thoughts, conclusions punished, while not understanding others, but still having to learn and memorize those facts even when I didn't understand how they came to be.
I’ve always found it interesting that in programming communities the two extremes of aphantasic and hyperphantasic seem to both be very overrepresented.