Aphantasia, Imagination and Dreaming

Cecily M.K. Whiteley. Philosophical Studies. 2021.

So here is something genuinely strange about aphantasia that most people have never thought about. If a person cannot generate mental images while awake, what happens when they dream? Cecily Whiteley is a philosopher at the London School of Economics and she uses that question to challenge a widely held theory about what dreams actually are.

The Question

There is a long-standing philosophical theory that says dreams are made of the same mental stuff as imagination, that dreaming is essentially your imagination running while you sleep. Whiteley asks whether aphantasia breaks that theory, and what it means for how we understand the relationship between voluntary and involuntary mental imagery.

The Discovery

Whiteley builds her argument on findings from Zeman et al. 2015 and Dawes et al. 2020. In the Zeman study of 21 aphantasic participants, 81% reported having rich visual dreams despite being completely unable to generate voluntary visual imagery while awake. That dissociation was statistically significant at p less than .01, meaning it was not a fluke. On top of that, 48% of the same group reported experiencing involuntary imagery while awake too, things like unwanted visual flashes or a song they could not get out of their head. So the voluntary system and the involuntary system appear to be genuinely separate. Whiteley argues this means dreams draw on the involuntary imagery system which aphantasia largely leaves intact, and that any theory of dreaming needs to account for that.

The Catch

This is a philosophy paper, not a neuroscience study. Whiteley does not collect new data. The 81% figure she centers her argument on comes from a study of only 21 people and relies entirely on self-reported dream content which is inherently difficult to verify. The argument itself is solid but the evidence it rests on is still thin. More research is needed before drawing firm conclusions.

The Insight

Aphantasia disrupts the ability to generate images on purpose. It does not appear to shut down the system that generates images without your permission. Those are different mechanisms and they behave differently.

The One Thing to Remember

If your child has aphantasia and tells you they dream in pictures, believe them. The voluntary and involuntary imagery systems in the brain appear to be separate and aphantasia affects one without necessarily touching the other. For parents this means one less thing to worry about and for clinicians it means the question to ask is not just "can you picture things" but "when does imagery show up for you and when does it not."

The Connection

The No Picture Needed paper spends a lot of time on what students with aphantasia cannot access on demand. This paper adds something the guide does not fully address. There are conditions under which imagery does appear for people with aphantasia and dreaming is one of them. That gap between what happens voluntarily and what happens involuntarily may be one of the most important things researchers figure out next.

You can read the full paper by clicking here.