Maladaptive daydreamers

People with aphantasia report a variety of experiences. 

• Some can “hear” in their minds, while others can’t imagine either vision or hearing. 
• Some have excellent autobiographical memory, while many do not. 
• Some have involuntary flashes of mental imagery. 
• Most dream in images, but some cannot. 
• Most are born with aphantasia, although a small minority acquire it after injury. 

“Aphantasia is not a monolithic phenomenon,” Nanay said.

Neither is hyperphantasia. 

People with hyperphantasia see mental images that seem to them as real as the things they actually see. 

The images that hyperphantasics see aren’t the same as hallucinations because they know, at the time, that they’re not real. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel real.

There’s a subset of people with extremely vivid imaginations who are known as maladaptive daydreamers. 

Some choose to live in their imagination, rather than in real life, Dijkstra said. “They sit down on the couch, they don’t leave their house, they don’t go to school, they don’t see friends, they don’t go to their work. They just imagine their whole life just the way they want it. Because for them, it feels as real as reality.”

No matter how nascent the research is into these imaging extremes, the scientists all agree on one thing: Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders.