My life with Aphantasia, then I have an NDE and my 'Minds Eye' starts working--I start to *Visualize* for the first time in my life: what the Hell is *that*?

I recently discovered that I have this 'condition' called Aphantasia. It means that when I close my eyes and attempt to visualize anything—my mother's face, childhood bedroom, my favorite vacation spot, an ex-lover—I see absolutely NOTHING. It’s complete blackness. The lights do not turn on and within the wiring of my mind there exists no cognitive toolset to model, visualize or abstract anything at all. No movies, pictures, text, letters, numbers, colors. Nothing.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing. Only the blackness of an empty movie theater, but with the screen, running lights and exit lights all shut off. For one with Aphantasia, this is a life-long condition. If I paint, I do not see what it is that I want to create. If I write (or spell) I do not see any words before I type them out. No smell, no taste, no feeling that can be abstracted or recalled.

Apparently ~1% of the world's population have this condition and nearly all of us are completely oblivious to this being a fundamental difference in how our brain works compared to the rest of the human race. As you are growing up, you constantly hear phrases like "imagine sheep jumping over a fence; count them to fall asleep" or "picture your dream house, what color is it, is there a fence" or "picture yourself on a beach" or "visualize yourself in where you want to be in 5 years’ time" and so on and so on...

Every time we hear this, as an Aphantasiac, we just assume that this is a metaphorical exercise. We have no idea that people can actually do this. Even now, I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be able to visualize at will--how could you ever even fall asleep at night if this were possible??? That when you read a book, you are actually playing-out for yourself a movie...wow, I can't even imagine (literally).

I’ve been in love with four women in my life, and I can’t even tell you the color of their eyes! Why? Not because I'm flippant or insensitive, but because such a significant part of a human beings’ memory function is intrinsically tied to visual-recall. Incidentally, this also means that Aphantasiacs are strongly correlated to experiencing SDAM (Severally Deficient Autobiographical Memory).

Basically, this means that if you have Aphantasia, you probably do not remember much about your childhood. For myself, this means that my first true grouping of ‘memories’ (database entries in my invisible spreadsheet) start clumping together around the age of 12-13 (about the time of puberty). Essentially, this means that I don’t remember being a child, and my existence just seems to occur around the time that I'm becoming a teenager.

Then how does my brain work? Well, it’s like having a excel spreadsheet or database that holds facts and data-chunks. These are associated with everything by being ‘tagged’ by category. If I don’t apply a ‘tag’ to something, then I won't have that recall ability (like the color of my lovers’ eyes). But, of course, this database is invisible—it’s just there and it is how my mind works.

I’ve found this to be a helpful image showing some differences in how people think using a red apple as the target:

https://imgur.com/a/e55YsC2

So, because Aphantasia is so strongly connected to how people form, store and recall memories, it can affect your personality and development in a myriad of unusual ways. One of the most significant that I’ve identified for myself, was this complete void or lack of spirituality or any type of spiritual feeling. You can imagine (if you’re a 99%-er that is) that if you are unable to visualize and project in all your five senses, then listening to fantastical stories about god, gods, angels, miracles, magic, and other imaginative concepts would not hold any level of attractiveness to your psyche.

Think about being a child in church, temple or mosque, and you hear the story about a burning bush that speaks to humans from the Creator. This lesson is being shared with you from an accepted authority figure, with everyone you love sitting next to you and accepting it as truth and fact. While the authority figure is speaking, passing down this ancient oral tradition, you could then imagine the scenes playing out for you, and this may even be accompanied by other strange sensations and emotions. This will probably put its hooks into you and could be a formative milestone on your path to connecting to spirituality; to feeling and therefore knowing that there is more to this world and this life.

I never had that, but I what I did have was a feeling of being somewhat like an android or a robot. I could exercise a seemingly higher level of discipline over my behavior and personality to mold myself into who or what I thought I should be. But it’s always felt quite empty, like a soulless automaton. And because of this void, for years I carried with me a strong pull to make myself explore meditation. Meaning that it was forever at the top of one of my invisible “To Do” list spreadsheets; I needed to check off that box to confirm to myself that there, indeed, was nothing to that either, and then sort it into the column of other failed spiritual concepts that bounced off of me.

This void pulling on me, asking me to test and confirm that there is (or isn’t) more to life than living as an organic meat bag that eventually, one day, is buried in the dirt or spread, as ashes, to end as carbon dusted across a little patch of earth. So this is the WHY of why I had to get in and wrap my hands around the whole ‘Meditation’ thingy. But let’s return to this in a moment.

I’ve found from my recent interactions with Aphantasiacs (it appears to be a trait that is strongly genetically inherited) and from participating in the reddit subforum on Aphantasia that we will show a preference for being agnostic and are disproportionally weighted in the STEM and computer programming fields. Also, possibly sorting into a higher representation as INTJ in the Myers Briggs personality matrix (INTJ here, reporting for duty).

Note, if you think you have Aphantasia, go here to learn more and connect with others. Your reaction will probably mirror mine and the hundreds before me: you are stunned that your mind works so different and feel an overwhelming sadness for several days that you have been missing out on a large part of the human experience. I cried for three days straight. Don’t carry the sadness, there is beauty in the differences of how you experience life and consciousness: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/

Also more on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Let’s return back to Meditation. Now, as a concept or actual practice that one does, this can be an extremely easy activity to bounce off of and not connect to if you can't visualize in your minds eye. If you didn’t know about Aphantasia and didn’t know that you were different, then even just reading the comment sections under a meditation or binaural beats YouTube video could be devastatingly discouraging.

You read about people claiming to see colors and shapes, they claim to ‘hear’ and feel things that can be impossible to have actually happened to them (because I could not even Imagine what that experience would be like). Even worse than that, so much of a guided meditation session is an instructor telling you what to focus on visualizing in your mind’s eye. If you can't do that, then the whole thing is an extremely abstract and metaphorical exercise that alternates between states of being bored or frustrated or both.

And, of course, my first attempts at meditation were boring exercises of waiting for something to happen and then the frustration of feeling like I'm just not doing it correctly. And this would have been the end of it all for me, except for two things: The first (I) being that I had a Near Death Experience, which I've written about extensively in a book Im working on. The second (II) item is that I learn about my Aphantasia and that it is a ‘thing’ that explains my lack of being able to visualize.

So, I go back into this, and its more-or-less structured as an ongoing experimental project with the theory that I can learn to develop and connect the wiring for having and controlling my mind’s eye.

Almost immediately after understanding my Aphantasia, I begin to notice some differences in those moments when I have closed my eyes, and I reach that familiar state of full relaxation. It's so familiar to me now, getting to that place with my eyes closed, usually taking less than a minute of breathing deeply. Almost always I'm laying on my back and the room must be dark.

Where, originally, there was an empty and lightless movie theater screen when I closed my eyes, what begins to happen is, at first very faintly, out of the black void, there begin to form these muffled stars. It looks very much like standing on the dark side of the moon and all your surrounding view consists of several dozen vague stars against a heaviness of black.

But the similarity ends there, because the stars are not a contrasting white burst of light against the vacuum backdrop—they are merely a lighter form of the blackness. And they are not tight clusters of defined pixels—they are strangely fuzzy in definition. And this interstellar view is unusual because all the stars are the same size, with no clusters or galaxies.

Immediately after finding the starscape and being able to consistently get to it, there is something about this field where I know it isn’t an actual starscape that I'm seeing. And I know it’s not some imaginative playful thing that I’ve created in my mind’s eye—it carries some weight or presence, like a heavy gravitas in the same physical places on my body that I’ve learned to associate with ‘spiritual’ experiences.

I know these things in the sense that you can have a gut instinct or intuition and know in complete absence of any of the usual methods for how a people living in a Western culture would collectively test and agree on ‘truth’ or ‘fact’.

It’s a form of knowing or accessing data that comes to me in these situations at times where my consciousness is receiving information. It’s a process that I’ve become quite familiar with over the last 6 months and it’s not a phenomenon that I am going to go into much detail about in this post. Needless to say, I have tested this as much as I can without being able to submit nearly any of it to the measurable, quantifiable, peer-reviewed material science approach that turns the gears and wheels of our societies. I can’t expect anyone else to accept this or believe it—I would not have as recent as one year ago, I understand that and it’s fine. I'm skipping through a lot of the other development, experiences and new phenomenon that become everyday occurrences to me during this transformational period after the NDE.

But let me tell you what it is that I started seeing and ‘feeling’ in terms of accompanying physical sensations.

The first time I saw the starscape was in October 2017, nearly one year ago. After initially discovering it, it becomes the default backdrop for my mind’s eye when I am relaxed and there is little or no ambient/environmental lighting. As if my brain's desktop background is now a starscape of fuzzy little dark-stars, all spaced-out and barely-there.

At this point, my mind’s eye has never fully turned on or even been briefly activated. I’ve never seen a color, shape, person, cartoon or anything. I dream, and like most people with Aphantasia my dreams are vivid and engaging (visualizing during a dream or REM state uses a different part of the brain than ‘mind’s eye’ visualizations) but still nothing showing up in my mind’s eye, even after experiencing NDEs.

Almost immediately I begin to interact with the ‘stars’ and I know that I can interact with them because this ‘place’ has a heaviness to it that gives me the impression that my consciousness is “somewhere” and the stars are “something.” The first time that I focus in on one of the stars, it immediately begins to move….holy sh1t, I’m shocked!

Not only am I shocked, I'm also completely terrified. Haha! Sounds silly, doesn’t it, to see a little fuzzy dark-purple-black star move against the backdrop of your mind’s eye and your reaction is stark terror?

Well, imagine this happens and not only is it the first time that I’ve seen something with my eyes closed, but then it begins moving without my control. A lot has just happened. This is a lot to process.

But it’s not just that, it’s that when I ‘reach’ for the star—because when I say that I focused on a star, what I'm actually doing, mechanically speaking, is putting my full conscious awareness on the star-like object—that moment of connection to it gives me strong sensations at the three places in my body that I have recently learned to associate to a very specific form of metaphysical interaction.

And the feedback sensations I get are…well, off-putting. It doesn’t feel like ‘love’ or ‘euphoria’

Going back to the moment after I got terrified, the star that I reached out to ‘grab’ becomes brighter, appears to grow larger and move toward me slightly, and then takes off, shooting past and out of my field of view in an upward and right direction. Specifically, its motion starts out near the center of my field of view, and as it begins to move, it picks up speed under constant acceleration till it breaks-away from my reaching-out, always heading in the direction to the up and right of the center of my field of view.

As the star becomes active and starts moving, it actually increases in brightness and clarity to become a white dot of light. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen anything not-black in my mind’s eye. Prior to this, the ‘stars’ that I see are basically less-black splotches contrasting against the deep-black background.

Since the first time that a star broke away and zipped up to the right, I would go back to that starscape in meditation and try to grab more of them nearly every single day. There are some initial observations I can make that repeat themselves out in testing after trying to grab several hundred stars over the course of months:
• The stars always become brighter, more defined in resolution and begin moving under constant acceleration. This starts in the same moment that I ‘reach’ for them
• The stars always move in the exact same trajectory and direction. Always from the center toward the up-right side of my field of view
• The stars do not ‘disappear’ after zooming to the up and right of my initial field of view. I can move my head to follow the trajectory of the star and I can keep it in view as it is increasing speed. This is exactly like what you would experience if you were seeing this while wearing a Virtual Reality headset. It's like I'm in a holodeck of these stars, and they can’t simply just disappear.
• If I turn my head to follow the moving star, it will eventually loop back and swing into my view, growing larger and becoming unfocused and cloud-like during the switchback
• If I think about a person I know, a new star will appear in the center of my field of view, and then immediately begin following the same action of increasing in speed and zipping off to the up and right.
• When I reach to connect to a star, there is a push-back sensation that I am trying to wrangle or catch something that does NOT want to be held.

Playing around with this starscape and these objects becomes a nightly ritual for months. In fact, I begin to develop some very unhealthy sleep hygiene protocols because I end up playing around with meditation every night when I'm supposed to be lying in bed to go to sleep. More often than not, I'm staying awake for hours, deep into the early morning, trying to create a breakthrough and capture one of these little guys.

Every time I get a little more to happen, my first reaction is fear! I'm constantly scaring myself with each new step in progress, and then immediately chiding myself for being such a fearful little experimenter. The only thing more powerful than my predilection for being afraid every time something new happens, is my childlike curiosity that drives me to answer the most fundamental existential questions of our kind: Who are we? What is the purpose of homo sapien? Is there a creator? Is there more than the physical world?

Over these months, I am having many breakthroughs outside of this Mind’s Eye project, my little ‘Operation Starscape’, and I'm getting some answers regarding these questions. These will all inevitably show the webs of a network of connected infrastructure that I believe provides some answers. The most important development that happens during this journey that directly supports my experimenting with the stars, is the ongoing familiarity and fluency I'm developing for the strange physical and electromagnetic sensations I begin to have, and how those are connected to repeatable processes or meditation experiments.

So, to mark my progress at this point, I have tried to grab thousands of stars. I’ve had a few moments where I could hold on to them longer than the other times, as difficult as holding on to a bucking bull that is thrashing to throw you off, and what happens is that they begin to grow larger in size accompanied by increased clarity/resolution and brightness.

If I can hold on to a star for a few seconds longer, then it doesn’t stop moving, but what it does do is adjust the trajectory of its movement so that its generally moving straight toward the middle of my head but still veering off to the up and right. Eventually, they break through my hold and will follow the same flight path out. But this leads me to believe that with enough practice I can bring one straight into my field of view and zoom in close enough to see something very detailed.

I have some theories as to what these stars actually are, and I have a very clear theory on what I expect to happen and ‘see’ once I can finally grab one of these and pull it straight into my view. It’s something I spent quite a lot of time thinking about: what would I see if I could bring one up close. I was certain that it would open up a cloud or box in the center of my view and then I would be shown proof that supported what I thought the stars actually were.

Then, one morning, while going through the usual process of getting to my default desktop background, selecting a star, and reaching out for it…. I caught one. It tried to escape, but I exerted more ‘force’ and remained in a calm state without letting myself get terrified—and I held it. I was floored by what I saw. Then I was immediately terrified.

---

Before I share with you what I saw, I need to touch on two things: the first (I) being that I had a vastly different expectation built up for many months and hundreds of hours of practice, about what I would eventually see. I want to share more about this because it’s another piece of the puzzle that I'm attempting to put together to find real answers about this phenomenon; the Metaphysical phenomenon that started more than a year ago following my NDEs (Here is the link for that post from 6 months ago)

Because I'm exploring human consciousness, I'm trying as much as I can to figure out how the system works in absence of any objective tools or measurement capabilities. Unfortunately, because it is human consciousness, everything I want metrics on is a subjective endogenous experience. Therefore, what’s left as the best tools in my toolbox for discovering the rules and boundaries is to run as many iterations as possible and then apply deductive and reductive reasoning to determine some truths. Then run more test iterations to observe congruent/non-congruent behavior.

I must be open to the possibility that everything I’ve seen and felt in this ‘starscape’, this burgeoning simulacrum of what might one day be a functioning mind’s eye, is something I've fantasized or manifested with no deeper meaning.

At least initially, that has to be on the table as a real possibility. But I know now that it’s not at all something I’ve simply made up. I think that if I did make it up, I would have likely seen something closer to my expectation, thereby providing myself with a nice little helping of confirmation bias to support my theory. And if I were fluent at ‘making-shish-up’ I would love to stop scaring myself as well.

And also, I know it’s real due to the second point, (II) because I get extremely significant physical sensations accompanying the visual interactions with the stars in the form of electromagnetic pressures applied to the same three places on my body that always receive those sensation with a paranormal experience.

In these precise locations, I feel a strong swelling and penetrating force, as if each of them were small spherical airbags and other external high-pressure airbags begin pushing into them: (i) the center of my skull cavity (ii) the center of my chest, roughly 2 inches higher than my nipples and (iii) the area directly behind my belly button. Every time I receive these sensations, I know that my consciousness is reaching out and connecting to this web.

Now, coming from a life spent as a dedicated militant atheist and a consciously skeptical engineer-like background, I know what this sounds like. These last few sentences being just as abstract and impossible to relate to as someone trying to describe to me what it’s like having an over-active imagination in their mind’s eye (Hyperphantasia). I can’t relate, I can’t understand because I don’t have the tools/wiring and have never had the experience. That’s really just where it ends, sadly.

I’ve tried to explain my interactions and understanding of ‘what’ human consciousness is and ‘where’ it is located to some of my dearest friends and family. People who earnestly want to hear what I believe. But I realize that even using a handful of diagrams and pictures as visual aids, the entire concept is so outside a persons’ experience that it becomes a foreign language exchange, and I am the barbarians at the gate mumbling “Bar-bar, bar-bar-bar—bar-BAR, yunno-BAR?”

It’s just too damn abstract, like trying to imagine a number with 300 zeros after it in terms of ice cream cones. Or if I were born with sight as a sense—the others only had four senses—and I begin trying to explain to people what it is like to see with my eyes. Even the idea of ‘colors’ becomes too abstract, becoming only an association they apply to the type of kool-aid I'm proffering.

What was I convinced I would see? I was thinking that if I brought one of the stars straight toward me, it would increase in size to eventually show a window of a person that I know. Likely providing some visual data about their current state, at that exact moment. My strongest theory was that I had stumbled upon the mechanics of how Remote Viewing works.

Now, I’ve never had a Remote Viewing experience myself, but I do personally know two people that can do it at will. And, of course, I’ve read as much about it as possible from forums, other sites/sources and Freedom of Information Act releases from the three-lettered agencies. I believe/know that it’s possible to do such a thing, but because of how I’ve come into all this metaphysical phenomenon, if I don’t understand the A-B-C’s of the actual mechanics of how to do something, then I won’t get there to it.

My whole approach and experience with all this woo-woo has been like an engineer who disassembles complex working assemblies to figure out how the parts and pieces work, then emulate the processes through simple mechanics to run as many iterations as possible (Design of Engineering-like experiments).

It all happens in moments. This time, the thing that helped me grab and hold the star, was that I was so relaxed I didn’t allow that swelling of fear behind my belly button to break my hold on the accelerating point of light. The stars seem to be compelled to escape from any hold like this, so it is still moving, and gaining speed but the difference is that this time it is moving straight toward the middle of my head, “it’s coming right for me!”

As it moves in closer, the single bright point of light begins to break into several much smaller points of light. So, within a mere moment, the object has grown in size and I now see what looks like 5-8 smaller but brighter white dots. The area surrounding the object changes as well and develops a cloud-like border that outlines the entirety of the growing structure. In the gap between the cloud-border and the white dots, the black background increases in clarity, giving the effect of looking at the object through a periscope or monocular lens.

Then, in what seems like both an eternity and an instant, the object stops moving. It's completely held in my grasp. It's the first time one of these ‘stars’ has ever stopped moving since I initially connect my consciousness, reaching out to grab them. It has stopped moving on its flight path trajectory, however it is SHAKING with such a violence that I am terror-stricken. The object looks like one of those molecular chain models you would assemble together in chemistry class, like a less-fun lego analogue. Each of the white points of light are now the spherical molecules and they are connected in a geometric structure by lines which are acting as bonds.

The object is shaking against my hold with such a force that it’s vibrating to create mirror images of itself. The only thought that comes to mind is the compulsion of a quantum particle shaking with all its energy to disentangle and resume is vibrational free will, to oscillate at the frequency it was on before I tore it out of the sky.

The unpleasant feeling I'm experiencing in my stomach is not simply my component of fear, this scaredy-cat experimenter’s inherent fear of the unknown and mysterious. It’s also potentially feedback from either this object or another external source that this is something that should not be done. One is not supposed to be stopping these objects from their natural state of vibration. I really can’t say more than that, or further explain it; it simply is

Here is a sketch I made of the experience a few hours afterward. I drew some flat lines emanating from the outer corners to suggest the shaking, but nothing I could ever put down on paper could describe the frantic struggle of the object shaking against being held in such a manner. Honestly, it was scary as sh1t to see and feel the object shaking to escape that state:

Within moments, I lose my hold on the object, simply too astonished by what I’ve seen and stupefied by the violence of the shaking to break out. I open my eyes.

My theory of what I would see was completely shredded. What the hell just happened? What the hell was that thing. I was so convinced I would see a person or entity when I could get a good view of one---so then wtf was that all about?

Something just happened there. Whatever that structure is, it means something. I know it does, there is a gravitas or extreme heaviness to this interaction and my experience with running so many iterations in all other areas tells me that something just happened. But what…?

And why did it feel wrong? I can understand my being afraid—sh1t, it would be super-weird for anything to have happened where I didn’t immediately become frightened. But why this feeling of “hey, STOP it!?” Where did that come from? And did I really even feel that?

What is the purpose of the starscape? What is the purpose of the stars and why would I be able to interact with them if I'm not supposed to grab them? Am I not supposed to grab them? Did I just manifest that feeling toward myself because of my shock about not seeing what I thought I would see?

I resolve to continue testing, I need more iterations to be sure that I just didn’t scare myself out of my wits. So, I do it again, and then a third time. The next two catches happen within about 3 days of the first one. It's not something I can do every time I want to. I have to be very relaxed, I have to not allow the fear or negative feeling to break the hold, and I have to exert a strong force of concentration from the three points in my body, aligning to form a ‘lasso-of-sorts’ to freeze the object.

The following two times show the same results and experience. I'm seeing this complex geometric structure, shaking with a violence that I will never forget or be able to describe.

I try one more time, under different circumstances, and after this one, I’ve basically quit any aspect of this project where I try to grab and hold a ‘star’. Full Stop. Any further exploration of the starscape will have to use a different approach than trying to ‘grab’ and freeze one.

In the final run, I'm sitting next to my Hospice patient, in this case being called in on short notice for a patient that is ‘Actively Dying.’ I started volunteering with the Hospice program after my NDEs because of how my relationship with ‘death’ changed so dramatically, and I wanted to try to provide some level of comfort about passing from this world to people with little or no human relationships at the end.

All you do in an Active Dying scenario is hold their hand, talk to them, be there. I'm sitting there and I'm wondering if I can see the patient’s ‘star’ so I close my eyes, the room is quite dark, and I get to the starscape. I'm holding the patient’s hand, and I feel the electromagnetic energy moving between our fields in the area from the patient’s forearm, swirling around our joined hands and up through my forearm. It feels as if electromagnetic mini-tornados are swirling around in an exchange of energy. I'm sending comfort and love, the patient is unable to speak.

I find the starfield, I send my consciousness to connect to the patient, this act will always summon a new star in the center of the field. I then connect the three points on my body and ‘reach out’ to connect to the star. I'm immediately hit with sharp pains and uncomfortable-feedback in those same three parts of my body. I immediately stop. My head hurts…what the hell just happened? Because I have no idea what is happening and what I'm doing, I'm totally uncomfortable with trying something like that again.

Soon after, I'm having a conversation with my dear cousin, I show him the simple sketch I drew, and I am describing the events. We both go to a google search while on the phone call—like the many times before, we are bouncing ideas off each other, trying to find answers. He finds some images and as soon as I see them, I KNOW that these are the structures I am seeing in the starfield:

So here I am now, my little ‘Operation Starscape’ is on hold for the moment. Meaning that I still go to the star field multiple times each day—heck I couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to now, it’s just simply there every night between closing my eyes and just before falling asleep. But it’s ‘on hold’ in the sense that I'm very hesitant to reach out and grab stars.

But there is something more than that. After I caught my first one, and saw the object, I notice that if I start to put more of a ‘Relaxed-Observer’ application of my consciousness to this webbed starfield, I’ll notice that some of the stars begin to take on a color. I think I've seen blue and I think I’ve seen green—but a vast majority of them remain white.

And then there are the Red stars. I did have an experience with trying to grab one of them. I really can't believe that I was so bold to even attempt such a thing, their reaction to this was...[ahem]. I’ve had some other experiences with the ‘Red Stars’, but if you haven’t yet picked up any of the projection of fear I’ve felt coming through my written prose, then when it comes to the ‘Red stars’, well you can’t possibly even Imagine…