What Aphantasics Dream: A Multisensory Study

Derek H. Arnold, Loren N. Bouyer, and Merlin Monzel. Scientific Reports. 2026.

Normally the title of the post matches the name of the study, but the title Heterogeneous Relationships Between the Multisensory Content of Aphantasics' Dreams and Their Volitional Waking Imagined Experiences was a bit wordy so I changed it :)

A question many people ask when they learn about aphantasia is whether it affects dreams. Most research has only asked yes or no about visual dreams. This study went further and mapped out the full sensory picture across both waking and dreaming, then asked whether the two matched.

The Question

When a person with aphantasia dreams, does what shows up in their dreams reflect what they can or cannot do on purpose while awake? And is the answer the same for every person with aphantasia, or does it vary?

The Discovery

84 people with visual aphantasia and 121 comparison participants completed detailed questionnaires measuring imagined experience across six senses, awake and dreaming. 79% of the aphantasic group scored a complete zero on the visual imagery measure, so most had total absence rather than just weak imagery. Despite that, 46% said they always have visual dreams. Only about 8% said they never dream visually. Most people in this study with no waking visual imagination still see things in their dreams most or all of the time.

When researchers looked at which senses showed a connection between dream content and waking ability, vision showed almost no relationship at all (p = .580, not statistically significant). Inner voice and imagined sound were the senses where dreaming and waking ability tracked each other most clearly (p = .005 and p = .006). People who dreamed with a strong inner voice also tended to have a stronger waking inner voice. People who dreamed visually did not, as a pattern, have stronger waking visual imagery.

A p-value is the probability that a result happened by chance rather than reflecting a real pattern. The lower the number, the less likely the finding is random noise. Researchers generally treat anything below .05, meaning less than a 5% chance of being random, as meaningful. Think of it as a coincidence score. The lower it is, the more confident researchers are that something real is going on. 

The individual differences were large and consistent. Some people with aphantasia had dreams that closely matched what they could do while awake. Others had vivid visual dreams paired with zero waking visual imagination. When the same comparison was run three separate ways using different measurement tools, results held steady at correlations as high as Rho = 0.79. That kind of consistency rules out random variation. The tightness or looseness of the connection between a person's waking and dreaming experience appears to be a stable feature of that individual.

Rho is a correlation coefficient. It measures how strongly two things move together, on a scale from 0 to 1. A Rho of 0 means no relationship at all. A Rho of 1 means a perfect relationship, where knowing one value tells you exactly what the other will be. Researchers generally treat anything above 0.3 as a weak association, above 0.5 as moderate, and above 0.7 as strong. A Rho of 0.79 means the two things tracked each other very closely across individuals.

The Catch

This is an early access manuscript that has not yet been through final copyediting. All of the data come from self-report, and dream reports specifically depend on memory of dreams after waking up, which is genuinely unreliable. The findings are correlational and the authors themselves are clear that they do not prove waking and dreaming imagination share the same underlying brain processes.

The Insight

Vision is not the central axis connecting dreaming and waking imagination in aphantasia. Inner voice is. A person can have zero waking visual imagination and still dream in pictures regularly. Whether that happens or not appears to be specific to the individual rather than a general feature of aphantasia.

The One Thing to Remember

If a student, client, or family member with aphantasia says they dream visually, that is not a contradiction of their aphantasia diagnosis and it is not confusion about their own condition. It is actually the most common pattern in this study. Worth knowing before you question someone's self-report.

The Connection

The No Picture Needed guide notes that many people with aphantasia have visual dreams and treats the voluntary versus involuntary distinction as one of the open questions in the field. This study adds something the guide leaves unaddressed. The separation between waking and dreaming imagination is not the same for every person with aphantasia. For some people the two track closely. For others they are almost entirely disconnected. And the sense most reliably connected across states of consciousness is not vision at all. It is inner voice.

You can read the full paper by clicking here.