Who here is on Team No-Visualization? Besides my literal understanding of what is read...

Who here is on Team No-Visualization? Besides my literal understanding of what is read, I very rarely have any mental picture of the events of the story. The only instance where this isn't the case is if I've seen the film-adaptation of the book, but then I'm stuck thinking of the casted actors rather than developing my own image of the characters; even then, it's difficult to construct visual scenes in my head. Do any of you have this issue?

I can mostly relate. I am somebody who definitely thinks with imagery, but they aren’t clear images. Blurry, and usually beyond my control. When I read, I get little to know visualisation. When I write, though, I see a lot. In fact, my method of writing is usually to follow my imagination.

I find that I have to consciously attempt to visualize scenes, or else I will just see the words. It doesn't help when you read in a crowded place with things going on, which is what I usually do. In those situations you're more present of your surroundings and it's harder to remove yourself from reality and picture a scene.

Me. My imagination is nil and I at best get small snapshot images of scenes that might be slightly discolored.

I think it might be insomnia and crappy diet causing long term brain fog though

Visualization is haram. No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!

I have the opposite problem, I can visualise the places and characters I read about very well. This can be a problem though, reading kafkaesque books is hard for me, because of the unsettling sceneries that are visualised for me. Also I sometimes lose my focus on reading between chapters because I've visualised a scene and find it hard to let it go and replace it with a new one.

Pardon my bad english!

wow, I wish I had an imagination

I'm team /non-fiction/ myself. Don't need to visualize shit. I'm 4th dimensional.

I set a fleshed out stage in my head for absolutely everything I read. I give all the characters unique appearances and try to mentally build as much of the scene as possible including the background sounds and overall ambience. It makes things much more memorable and I can usually recall my favorite parts of books as though they were movie scenes.

I also like to look up all kinds of pictures of where books take place to give myself something to work with for the setting

It is frustatingly hard for me to have a mental image of something even when I am trying to remember it having previously seen it. I have a superb memory but instead of seeing things in my brain I can kind of describe them.

On another not it kind of freaks me out in a way that I can form words in my head. I know that sounds retarded but I am just like, "wow."

You guys are missing out. I wouldn't be able to read fiction if I couldn't visualize it.

How many of you who can't visualize know how to paint/draw? I think these might be related.

>I give all the characters unique appearances
>I also like to look up all kinds of pictures of where books take place to give myself something to work with for the setting
Same, senpai. What results is something like a scene from a film, depending on the potency of the author's descriptive prose. I then remember those scenes the same way I remember my what my dreams look like. Just recently I read that scene in Gravity's Rainbow where they're at the beach in Peenemunde. If I really focus in on the memory of what I visualized, I can remember it like I was there with Slothrop & co.

I draw in my spare time and visualize the scenes I read.

Aphantasic user reporting in.
I feel that I can form mental images, I just can't see them. I can think about a specific beach without having to mentally state any of his properties, yet I can't see it nor draw it.
I juat have the concept of that specific beach, wich is just a collection of all the obesrvations I've made about it.

That said I've seen people on the internet that ahave way less imagination than me. If I close my eyes I see nothing, but I still can mentally, in an abstract way, rotate a solid in my head. I can't see it but I know it's position in space.
On the other hand I've seen people that are simply uncapable of, for example, walking in their room with the lights off.

>tfw you're a illustrator
>tfw you have to resort to lucid dreams or drawing improvisation in order to reach the image you're actually thinking about
Life is suffering, my friends.

>Besides my literal understanding of what is read, I very rarely have any mental picture of the events of the story.
Yes, that's quite common for functional illiterates. Welcome to Veeky Forums, you will find a nice home here. (You can immediately start a "rate my bookshelf lol" thread to celebrate.)

We could be friends too user.

I remember what I've read in books by recalling the visual images made, not the text itself. The more descriptive a writer's prose is, the easier it is for me to make up a visual image of the scene.

LITERALLY WHAT IS THE POINT OF READING IF YOU CAN'T VISUALISE

For me reading is a way of dreaming in the daytime.

To learn and better yourself. You can be sure that people with aphantasia will not be drawn by shitty fantasy and pulp books. They have a mental defense against that trash.

Also I guess that it makes reading philosophy way easier, since they only think verbally.

That said, I'm pretty sure that reading La research by Proust is impossible if you can't form mental images.

Are you prescribing me a more regular reading habit?

I'm in this camp. Sometimes I'll put a book down and pace around the room while I play with what I just read in my mind. Snapping the characters into different contexts. Reimagining the setting in a different period. Making it cyberpunk for no reason.

I lean on visualization too hard. When I play Violin I don't even sightread. I memorize the entire piece as a visual road map of audio/visual landmarks. I think it's because of my AD/HD. I live in my head whenever I get stressed. It's great for art but shit for life.

I once paced around my apartment for about 4 hours straight trying to pin down how exactly a telekinetic would see the world if they were blind. I get up my own ass too often.

I can oly tear appart fiction after I've burned through it once. I can't leave a story unfinished. I read through that trash YA series by James Patterson about Mary Sue bird people even though I knew it was mental poison. If books made you gain weight I'd have a serious problem.

I'm just too good at springboarding off of something "cool"

That sounds terrible. I have the opposite problem. My visualization is so pronounced, that I sometimes forget what actually happened, or what I just imagined, or read about.

>have a dream about a season finale of a series
>two weeks later
>eating dinner
>food in mouth
>suddenly realize that not only was that not the actual season finale
>but I hadn't seen a single episode of that entire season
>mfw

I know a girl who had that too. Do you perhaps read fast and also wear thick glasses?

I guess visualizing comes easier for artists then. Makes sense.

I think you're confused user. You can't have such vivid visualization that you forget something, if anything that'd make you remeber things for way longer than normal. You just have memory problems.

>You can't have such vivid visualization that you forget something
I guess I phrased it wrong. I sometimes replace memories with made up memories.

My dreams are always 3rd person and extremely surreal. I have this reoccuring one where I watch people slowly disolve into red paste. Or one where children drown in a pool. My subconcious is fucked up.

All of my dreams have either demons or serial killers in them. Bad shit. One time, I dreamt I got shot in the throat, so someone gave me a tracheotomy with a pen. Then I had a dream that goblin fay clawed my throat out with their praying mantis arms. My hand was against my throat while I was sleeping, so you can imagine my pants shitting terror when I finally managed to wake up.

that sounds reasonable

I just have normie dreams about teeth falling out and being in an out-of-control car. I want some fucked up dreams too.

I'm a dude, but the other two are more or less true. I can polish off most novels in about half a day of dedicated time, I think most "fast" readers are just people who don't get bored with books. We're addicts.

Teeth falling out is pretty horrifying to me. But most body horror freaks me out. Not so much conventional violence but the idea of a body falling appart or failing in some way freaks me right out.

I had a dream once that I stepped on some nails and my foot broke in half lengthwise, completely bloodlessly. I could see the fatty tissue gleaming improbably white as it shore away from the bone...

Why do I do this to myself.

I think I get all this from my mom. She had some trippy as hell pregnancy dreams while she was carrying me.

>play lots of game as a child
>have been able to put dreams in pause since I was 10
>i can just think "pause" and everything stops, a menu comes out and I can interact with the dream's mechanics through it

>tfw fucked up childhood
>dream fucked up shit everynight (people raping me, my body going rotten, people stabbing my arms and kegs)
>tfw the ability to always put everything in pause when something fucked up happens is the only thing that keeps me sane

10 hours of videogames everyday for 4-5 years will fix nightmares for you, mate.

>Teeth falling out is pretty horrifying to me. But most body horror freaks me out.
The first dream I can remember is my teeth falling out. I was probably 3 or something. They just fell out, all in a row and danced away.
I have a lot of gore dreams, but my thing is eyes.
Once I had a dream that I was in a pocket dimension that was kinda like The Cube (the movie) We could only get out by tricking people in (our) dimension into taking our place. It would suddenly disjoint like a photograph being cut down the middle and then put back together, just ever so slightly off. I saw it and ducked, but the kid behind me didn't, and the disjoint slashed his eye open. There was this closeup of his eye opening up and gushing like a cut open tennis ball.

Then once I dreamt the white of my eyes melted, and they dripped all chunky down my face like sorta cooked egg whites.

I got raped by dolphins once.

>muh visualization

>do you perform 'muh visualisation' while you read, or, alternatively, are you one of those who can't and wouldn't be able to do it

reminder that you're all post-TV generation-born degenerate scum

My parents were too cheap for cable so I read and ran around outside instead. Regardless, I think it's funny that you think that visualization is directly related to television. What I want to know is how naturally blind people see books.

My eye related nightmare was of insect antenna bursting through the iris to extend about a foot in front of each figure. There was no blood.

They don't

Well, deaf people "think" in people signing. I think blind people would "see" in sounds.

I don't think normal people actually see what they are visualizing. We see it, but it's like totally separate from Normal vision. It almost like having a third eye that occupies a different dimension than your regular field of vision.

Another user here. I usually have normal dreams, but sometimes a rogue freak pops up and takes me on a journey. Like last night. Pretty vivid, I still remember it.

I dreamt that our world, as it stands, exists within the fictional ontological plane of Gravity's Rainbow, one step removed from primary ontological existence, because on that real ontological level, the world had ended two hundred years ago. Society slowly revived, but it developed into a very fucked up, never-before-seen-or-even-imagined culture of outright mental breakdown. In despair, Tommy Pynchon, now very old, researched the ol' days thoroughly and wrote a book trying to describe what life was like before the Ultimate Rocket, the A-bomb, eliminated everything, so that at least something would exist on some ontological level of existence resembling the good old days when the world was at least half sane. Problem is, while writing GR, despite his best efforts to encapsulate the old world truly in its purest form, the cultural mess of the post-A-bomb-world's insanity crept into GR by way of unguarded subconscious networks, filtering inwards, tainting GR and the entire meta-universe it created, so that you, me, they, everyone has to live through "this".

The second phase of the dream involved myself somehow being granted this knowledge, by good will of some benevolent wayward spirit (maybe Ruggles, i dont remember). In a great panoramic narration, flashing by in a reel like a cinematic exposition dump, I envisioned the epiphany, travelling through time, space, ontological levels, coming finally to the Real World -- the post-A-bomb-world. Shit's fucked. People can't communicate anymore. Neo-SJW-vigilantes have stripped to nudity, hairy cunts, dicks, tits swaying about, having painted themselves with irradiated pink ochre, waving guns, pursuing me and some random stranger who'd driven a somehow still functioning car into the sea straight off the edge of the Great Australian Bite for no other reason but that they missed doing that sort of shit in GTA. Skip a few scenes and I'm in some shitty town, blasted up, still irradiated (wtf am I doing here) not so much physically as spiritually, with a giant angry German mother searching for me, thinking I was her son (she was going to give a real whacking when she got her hands on--

Never mind, because a woman who looks like Oedipa Mass, Maxine Tarnow and Pynchon's ex combined, an aura of safety around her, has appeared and is holding in her hands a copy of none other than the first manuscript of Gravity's Rainbow, the title of which is obviously a correction from an older one, crossed out, reading "What The Fuck Is Going On?". The woman is very silent, but her expression says everything -- she opens the manuscript and shows me... what exactly? There must have been too much holy knowledge, deconstructed, then reconstructed, then redeconstructed into the Holy Text, because I remember nothing...

Now I'm either inside or outside a giant fenced compound (can't tell) where, somehow, vehicles have been restored into a shitty working order but polished to look like one massive advertisement in a land where company incentive doesn't even exist anymore. That Oedipa/Maxine/Pynchon's ex has abandoned me. There's a Junkrat impersonator running around rolling a giant tractor tire in front of him, screaming, "hah aha h ah, vvvrrrrrrrmmmMmmMMMM BOOOOOM!!!!!!" while cradling a big metal pipe as if it was a gun and lobbing billiard balls at guards armed holding (literally) planks of wood for weapons. I think I must have stolen a car, because suddenly I'm bailing from its driver-side door before it barrages off a cliff into the ocean below. Then I'm thinking, wait -- am I falling for this now as well? This new-world-wide need to go back to what we were?, a fun-consumed post modern collection of 7 billion existential dilemmas on legs?...

All this time, the guiding voice of none other than Pynchon had been there in my ears, not my head, but I could never see him. As soon as I realized this, I woke up.

Fucking strange. Most other nights I have normal dreams.

I know someone who isn't an artist, and he says he doesn't trust his mind's eye or his memories because they are too ethereal.

How do you understand anything that is going on without visualizing? That is like trying to imagine what someone looks like without imagining an image. How does that work?