Blind Imagination

When someone says, “Picture an apple,” I don’t.

Not because I won’t—but because I can’t. My mind doesn’t produce images. There’s no shiny red fruit hovering in the dark behind my eyelids, no dew-drop glint, no soft-focus stem. I know what an apple is—its taste, its weight, its cultural baggage from Eve to Snow White—but I can’t see it. Until recently, I assumed everyone else was the same. I thought “picture an apple” was a metaphor.

It isn’t.

Around 2015, neurologist Adam Zeman gave a name to what people like me experience: aphantasia—the inability to form mental images. It’s not an illness or defect, just a different wiring of the brain. When most people imagine, their visual cortex lights up; when I do, it stays quiet. Scientists think roughly 2–3% of people have full aphantasia, with many more scattered along the spectrum. We live in a world that says “see it in your mind’s eye,” but ours comes with a blindfold.

The Invisible Imagination

Here’s the strange part: I can feel what imagining visually must be like. I have a sort of phantom sense of it, like knowing there’s music playing in another room but hearing only the rhythm through the wall. I can conceptualize what visualization would be—how it must flood the mind with shape and light—but I never actually experience it.

And honestly? That sounds exhausting. The idea of constant imagery seems overstimulating. My inner world is quiet. Words, ideas, and patterns live there, not pictures. I think in structure and tone—the architecture of thought rather than its decorations.

The Writer Who Doesn’t See

This is where people usually ask, “How can you write fiction if you can’t visualize?” The answer is: easily.

I don’t describe what I “see.” I describe what I know. Characters don’t appear before me in cinematic clarity—they reveal themselves through rhythm, speech, and motive. I sense the texture of a scene in cadence and contrast, not in light and color.

In editing, that difference becomes an advantage. I can spot when a sentence’s meaning buckles under pretty prose, or when pacing stumbles even if the imagery sparkles. My mind reads structure the way others read pictures. I suspect that’s why my stories and edits lean toward precision: my imagination runs in code, not in graphics.

A Different Kind of Vision

Aphantasia doesn’t make imagination weaker—it just changes its dialect. I don’t see dragons; I know their weight, their voice, the tremor of air when they land. My creativity is tactile and linguistic, not visual. It’s built from cause, emotion, and rhythm—the invisible skeleton of story.

So yes, I imagine blindly. But blind imagination isn’t darkness. It’s the mind’s version of braille—feeling the shape of things without ever needing to see them.