Psychology Today60%
Do Aphantasics Dream in Images? 13%
By Bence Nanay Ph.D.11%
8/3/2026, 6:25:08 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Representativeness Heuristic, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Ambiguity (Equivocation) as the most egregious example at 21.3% saturation with 108 hits. Analysis detected 618 faulty-reasoning hits from 506 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 23.4% and a BS Rank of 13% (24,637 of 28,251 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.20% of the article peer group.
Close your eyes and visualize an apple.
What do you see 'in your mind's eye'?
Most people see a pale image of an apple.
Some, however, see nothing.
This condition is called aphantasia.
Aphantasics report no conscious mental imagery.
Their 'mind's eye' is blind.
Research on aphantasia is relatively new, but has accelerated in the last couple of years.
We now know that there are many underlying causes of aphantasia.
Some aphantasics, while they don't have any visual imagery when deliberately trying to conjure up images, do have involuntary flashbacks of images.
Others don't.
Further, some aphantasics have visual imagery when taking psychedelic drugs.
Others don't.
Differences in Dreaming Experiences Among Aphantasics
The most important — and puzzling — difference among aphantasics is that some dream in images, whereas others don't.
Given that dreaming in images is one way in which imagery is used in the mind, one would expect that aphantasics would not have any imagistic dreams.
But some do.
How is this possible?
While the link between dreaming and aphantasia has bothered researchers for years, the first systematic study on it was published just a couple of weeks ago in the journal Scientific Reports.
More than 200 subjects were asked to assess the vividness of their imagery when awake and while dreaming.
And it turned out that 46% of aphantasics dreamed in images.
That is almost half.
But how is this possible?
How can aphantasics, who can't conjure up images when they are awake, have rich imagery when dreaming?
Aphantasia Is Not a Single Condition
To answer this question, it is important to understand that aphantasia is not a monolithic phenomenon.
You count as an aphantasic if you report no conscious imagery when visualizing.
But this can have a lot of very different underlying causes.
I described aphantasia as the blindness of the mind's eye.
But just as blindness can have very different underlying causes — problems with the retina, problems with the visual nerve, problems with the primary visual cortex — the same is true of aphantasia.
A lot of different things need to come together for us to see.
If any of these is missing, we get blindness.
Similarly, a lot of different things need to come together for us to have vivid mental imagery.
If any of these is missing, we get aphantasia.
More specifically, while some aphantasics have problems conjuring up mental imagery at will — for example, counting to three and visualizing an apple — their involuntary mental imagery is intact.
Their problem is not with their capacity to have imagery, but with their capacity to conjure up and control imagery.
Some other aphantasics, in contrast, don't seem to be able to have any imagery at all.
These are very different conditions.
Importantly, the former group would have no problem with dreaming in images.
But the latter group would.
In short, the findings about the differences between aphantasics in terms of their dreams can help us uncover the different underlying causes of the condition.
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