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Comment by suslik | Hacker News Reader

I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.

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Interesting that you say you had no visuals from LSD. How high a dose?

It's surprising to me, because as far as I understand it, psychedelic visuals aren't really akin to daydreams or internally generated imagery, but abnormal processing of external imagery. At least for relatively mild experiences. Something like a DMT breakthrough is a whole other story from what I hear, though I've never been there myself.

That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the highest I went for was about 4-500ug (according to the vendor, it was on a postal stamp so there can be quite some variance). I was exploring psychedelics several months in a row while increasing the dose, so there might have been some tolerance buildup. And it wasn't that I had no visuals at all - juar there was nothing visually profound, just some things shifting and moving here and there, people outside looking a bit strange, etc. Felt more like strange, weird drunkenness than anything. It was not at at all an uninteresting experience - just extremely cerebral. I tried DMT several times by the way, but couldn't break through - it gets very scary very fast, and the taste is like smoking a plastic bag, which was in itself quite off-putting.

I'm also aphantasic, but I do dream, though rarely remember them unless I wake up and go back to sleep (probably due to being a deep sleeper rather than anything to do with aphantasia). At most I get some attraction to and diffusion of (not sure how to describe this experience) fractal patterns and vibrant colors on LSD. On shrooms I've gotten some color-shifting of lights, but no open or closed-eye visualization or hallucination. Strong opiates have given me closed-eye hallucination (uncontrollable visualization) though.

How’s your sleep quality? I (aphantasic) only ever dream on weekends when I sleep in over 8 hours (rare), and having to get up to pee after 4 hours also cuts in.

Depends on the coffee intake and stress; when I am on vacation, I sleep 7-8 hours without waking up. I am lucky that I don't need to pee during the night, though.

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