Same Words, Different Worlds
An Aphantasia story, courtesy of Claude
Yesterday, a friend asked me “is there a fiction that has come close to mirroring your experience of self?”. Although there have been a few reports which I’ve resonated a lot with, none were fiction. I know what I’m gonna say next qualifies me for LLM psychosis, but my first thought was to ask Claude to write such a story for me 🤣
I spent a few hours describing my experience of Aphantasia and SDAM to it, it then wrote the story, and I spent a few hours iterating with it on it. The plot is fictional, but most of the internal experiences are real.
Hope this gives you a sense of what Aphantasia feels like (to me).
And now over to Claude:
Same Words, Different Worlds
I.
The coffee is too hot and I drink it anyway. It scalds the roof of my mouth in that specific way — a bright, thin pain that fades almost immediately — and I set the mug down on the counter. The kitchen window is letting in the kind of gray morning light that makes everything look honest. There are crumbs on the cutting board from toast I made. The fridge hums.
This is a Tuesday. I know this because I checked.
I work from home most days, writing code for a company that makes software for hospitals. It’s good work — the kind where you hold a dozen interlocking pieces in your head and nudge them around until they click. I’ve always been good at that. The holding, the nudging. Abstract structures that exist only as logic and sequence. I don’t see them, exactly. I just... think it through.
The coffee cools to the point where I can drink it properly. Outside, a woman walks past with a dog I’ve seen before — a large, loose-limbed thing with a reddish coat. I don’t know what breed. I watch them turn the corner and they’re gone, and the street is empty again, and I think about the module I need to refactor today, and the morning moves forward.
I should mention something about how I think, because it becomes important later.
If you ask me to imagine a beach, I will think about the concept of a beach. I’ll know there’s sand, water, the possibility of waves. I’ll know the sun is involved. I might think about the word beach and its associations: summer, holidays, the way sand gets everywhere. But there’s no picture. No golden light, no sound of waves, no blue. Behind my eyes it’s just... the dark. A comfortable, familiar dark, the way a room you’ve lived in for years is comfortable even without the lights on. I’ve never thought of this as unusual. It’s just what thinking is.
I read a lot. I’ve always read a lot. When I was young — eight, nine, ten — I would burn through books the way other kids burned through television. I read fast, and what I read went somewhere deep.
Not into images. That’s the thing I wouldn’t understand until much later: the words bypassed that entirely. They went straight in. I don’t know how else to describe it — when I read, the meaning arrives without any intermediate step. There’s no picture between the text and the thought. When I read about a castle, I didn’t see a castle. I understood a castle. I felt the weight and age of it as a concept, knew its halls and stairways the way you know your own house in the dark — by feel and logic and the spatial sense of where things have to be. I’d mapped the castle in my school, actually. The grounds became the approach road, the main building became the keep, the garden became the courtyard. This low-resolution, spatial, borrowed image was enough. It was more than enough. I read every book in that castle and never once wondered if I was doing it wrong.
The descriptions — the “slender turrets wreathed in mist” and “great oaken doors banded with iron” — I’d skim those the way you skim the terms of service. My eyes would catch on the moment a paragraph shifted from what things looked like to what was happening, what someone thought, what an idea meant. I was reading for the bones. The skeleton of the story, stripped of its flesh, was the whole meal for me.
If you’re reading this right now and pictures are forming in your mind — a kitchen, gray light, a mug — then you’re already doing something I can’t. And if no pictures are forming, if these words are arriving as pure understanding, meaning without image, then you’re reading the way I read. Either way, now you know there are two ways to take in a sentence, and until this moment you may not have known that.
I must have read hundreds of books by now. I don’t remember most of them. Not the plots, not the characters, not the scenes that moved me. But I believe — I have to believe — that they changed me. That each one left some deposit, some shift in how I understand the world, even though I can’t point to the specific book that caused the specific shift. My experience, distilled directly into whatever I am. You don’t remember individual meals from when you were twelve, but they built your bones.
I used to think this was just having a bad memory. Everyone forgets books, right? Everyone forgets most of their life. It wasn’t until much later that I learned there was something more specific going on — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
II.
My friend Elise calls on a Friday evening and asks me to come to a dinner party. I say yes because Elise is the kind of person you say yes to — she fills a room with warmth just by being in it, and I like being near her. I don’t see her enough. Or rather — this is something I’ve been thinking about lately — I don’t think about seeing her when I haven’t seen her in a while. When she calls, I’m glad. When she’s in front of me, I’m genuinely delighted. But in the gaps between, she simply... isn’t anywhere. Not in my thoughts, not in my awareness. She doesn’t fade. She doesn’t linger. She just isn’t present until she is again.
I think this is true for most of the people in my life, and I’ve wondered sometimes if it makes me a bad person.
At the dinner, there are eight of us around Elise’s long wooden table, and the food is good — roasted chicken, something with pomegranate, bread that’s still warm. I can taste all of this, right now, in this moment. The chicken skin is salty and crisp. The wine is a little too dry but I drink it anyway. The room is loud and bright and I’m inside it fully.
Then Dan, who I’ve known for years, starts telling a story about a trip we took together — three or four of us, a long weekend somewhere coastal, I want to say two summers ago. He’s describing the rental house we stayed in, and he’s specific: the kitchen had blue tile, there was a porch that creaked, you could hear the ocean from the bedroom. He’s talking about a night when we cooked too much pasta and the pot boiled over, and he and I were up late on that porch, and the stars were absurd, and we talked about whether we’d made the right career choices.
Everyone around the table is nodding, smiling. Someone says “that porch” with the particular warmth of a shared memory being warmed up again.
I know this trip happened. I know I was there. Dan’s description is not wrong — it triggers a faint recognition, the way hearing a fact you once knew confirmed feels mildly satisfying. Yes, there was a coast. Yes, there was pasta. But the blue tile, the creaking porch, the stars — these aren’t in me. I have no picture of the kitchen. I have no sound of the ocean. I don’t remember what Dan and I talked about on the porch, or what I felt while we talked, or what the air was like.
What I have is: we went on a trip. It was good. Dan was there.
This is how it’s always been. I thought it was how it was for everyone.
“You remember that?” Dan says to me, grinning.
“Of course,” I say.
This is a lie. Or not a lie, exactly. A performance of remembering. I know the trip happened. I can confirm Dan’s facts if he states them. But I’m not remembering it the way he is — I can see it in his face, the way his eyes go a little unfocused, the slight smile of someone who is there again, on that porch, in that night. He’s somewhere I can’t follow.
I eat more chicken. The conversation moves on.
Later, as people are leaving, I help Elise with the dishes. She’s telling me about a book she’s reading — a novel set in wartime, full of descriptive passages about landscapes and weather and the color of light. She says: “There’s this scene where the main character comes home and sees her mother’s garden, and the way the author describes it, I could just see it. The yellow flowers, the stone wall. I was there.”
I nod. I know what she means, in the way that I know what people mean when they say the sunset was beautiful. I’ve read that kind of passage a thousand times. I’ve never been there.
“Do you do that when you read?” she asks. “Actually picture it?”
The question is casual. She’s rinsing a plate. She doesn’t know she’s about to change something.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Like, nothing? You don’t see anything?”
“I see the words,” I say, and then I stop, because I’ve never actually thought about this before. What do I see when I read? I see the page. The font. The shapes of letters. And then — I don’t know how to describe this — the meaning arrives directly, without any intermediate step. The words go straight into understanding. There’s no picture between the text and the thought.
“Huh,” Elise says. She’s looking at me now. “That’s interesting. Because when I read about a garden, I see a garden. Like, in my head. In color.”
“In color?”
“Yeah. I mean, not photographically. But like... a garden. Green. Flowers. A wall.”
There’s something happening in me that I don’t have a name for yet. A door has opened a crack and behind it is a question I’ve never asked.
“What about — if I say, picture your mother’s face right now. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” she says. “I mean, it’s a little fuzzy. But yeah. I can see her.”
“See her.”
“In my mind, yeah.”
I put the dish towel down. The kitchen is very bright. Elise’s face is right there in front of me and it is completely real and I’m aware, suddenly, that if she walked out of this room right now, she would vanish from me. Not from my knowledge — I’d know her name, her laugh, the facts of her face — but from whatever place it is that she apparently occupies in her own mind as a picture she can summon.
I don’t say any of this. I say: “I can’t do that.”
She tilts her head.
“I can’t picture anything,” I say. “I’ve never been able to picture anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when I close my eyes, there’s nothing. It’s dark. If I try to picture your face right now, I know facts about your face — your eyes are brown, your hair is dark, you have that one freckle — but I can’t see it. There’s no picture.”
Elise is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing.”
She’s looking at me the way you’d look at someone who just told you they’ve never tasted salt. Not with pity. With bafflement.
I drive home that night and I can feel the crack widening.
III.
Over the next few days, I ask everyone.
My colleague Priya: “If I say think of an apple, what happens?” She gives me a look. “Yeah, a red apple. Why?” I ask about the detail — is there a stem? A leaf? Light? She thinks for a second. “Sort of shiny. There’s a little leaf. I don’t know why there’s a leaf but there is.”
My brother, over dinner at his apartment: I ask him to think about our old house and tell me what he sees. He puts down his fork and goes quiet for a moment, and then his face changes — softens — and he starts talking.
“The front yard. The big tree with the swing — you know the rope was fraying that last summer? Mom kept saying she’d replace it. The driveway, and Mom’s car, that blue Civic she had forever. And the kitchen — god, the kitchen. The counter was always cluttered. There was that ceramic fruit bowl Grandma gave us that nobody liked but nobody threw away. The fridge had those alphabet magnets on it, remember? You used to rearrange them into words.”
He’s smiling. His eyes have gone somewhere I’m beginning to recognize — that unfocused middle distance where people go when they’re watching a movie no one else can see.
“I can walk through the whole house in my head,” he says. “Room by room. I can see the light in the hallway in the afternoon. I can hear the screen door.”
I try to follow him there. I close my eyes and reach for the house.
What I get is this: there was a front door. It opened into a hallway. The hallway had rooms on both sides — kitchen to the left, living room to the right. Stairs going up. I know this the way I know a floor plan. I can navigate it. I can tell you which room connects to which, where the bathroom was in relation to the bedrooms. It’s spatial — directions and adjacencies, like a map drawn in the dark.
But there’s no light in my hallway. No screen door sound. No fraying rope. No ceramic fruit bowl. No alphabet magnets. My brother and I grew up in the same house, slept in the same room for years, and when we reach back for it, he finds a place — warm, lit, full of texture — and I find a diagram.
“The magnets,” I say. “I rearranged them?”
“All the time. You’d spell out weird stuff. Once you wrote FROG KING and wouldn’t explain why.”
I have absolutely no memory of this. Not the magnets, not the words, not the reason. It’s not that I forgot — it’s that there’s nowhere in me for it to be. My brother is carrying pieces of my childhood that I will never have. He is, in some ways, more of an archive of my early life than I am.
A friend from college, over text: “When you remember something that happened, do you see it? Like, do you watch it play back?” His response: “Yeah, kind of. Like a movie but worse quality.” I stare at my phone for a long time.
Each conversation is the same revelation repeated.
I go back through thirty years of idioms and discover they were all literal. “Picture this.” “I can see it now.” “In my mind’s eye.” Counting sheep — actual sheep, apparently, that people actually count. My whole life I thought “counting sheep” was a folksy way of saying “try to be bored enough to sleep.” It turns out people are manufacturing livestock.
I look it up. I find the word on a Tuesday afternoon — sitting at my desk, the same desk where I write code, the same window with the same gray light — and the word is aphantasia. The absence of the mind’s eye. Named only in 2015, after thousands of people contacted a neurologist when they realized — most of them for the first time in their lives — that “visualize” was not a metaphor.
I read everything I can find. The personal accounts read like dispatches from people living the same life I’ve been living without knowing it had a name. A woman who keeps boxes of ticket stubs because without them she wouldn’t remember the places she’d been. I learn that a scientist first studied this in 1880 — and then the whole thing lay dormant for over a century. Nobody thought to ask. Nobody realized there was something to ask about.
This is what staggers me. Not just the personal revelation, although that is still branching into every corner of my history. It’s the larger one. Something this basic — whether you see pictures when you think — was hidden for a hundred and thirty-five years because everyone assumed everyone else’s inner world was the same as their own. How many times have I used a word like “remember” or “imagine” and meant something completely different from the person I was talking to, and neither of us knew?
IV.
The re-examination takes weeks. It happens in layers, each one peeling back to reveal another.
* * *
The first layer is memory. This is where it hits hardest.
I think about my childhood and I discover — not for the first time, but for the first time with a reason — that it’s mostly gone. Not the facts. I know where I grew up, the schools I attended, the names of friends. I know my father used to take me to the library on Saturday mornings. I know my mother used to sing while she cooked. I know I was, by most accounts, a happy child. But I know these things the way I know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066. They are true and they are mine, but I cannot inhabit them.
I think about that dinner with my brother — his version of our house versus mine. Same walls, same years, same parents. He got a movie. I got a floor plan. And the strangest part: he’s carrying memories of me that I don’t have. The alphabet magnets. FROG KING. He remembers my childhood better than I do.
My father died five years ago. I know facts about the day I found out: where I was, who called me, what happened in the hours after. The fact of his death is an object in my mind — heavy, real, important. When I think about him deliberately, there is emotion: a pressure in my chest, something like sadness but more like gravity.
But I cannot see his face.
I try, right now, sitting at my desk. I close my eyes. I reach for him. And there is nothing — just the dark, and the knowledge that he had a face, and that I loved it, and that it’s gone in a way that feels more total than it should be. I know his eyes crinkled when he laughed. I know he had a scar above his left eyebrow. I know these things the way I know his birthday. But I can’t see him. I can’t assemble the pieces into a face. And sitting here, trying — really trying — for the first time since learning what trying means, I feel something rise in my throat that isn’t an idea and isn’t an insight. It’s just grief, plain and physical, arriving before I can frame it. My eyes burn. I press my palms against them and the dark is the same dark it always is.
This is the first time I’ve cried about this. Not about his death — I cried about that, five years ago, in real time. This is something different. This is crying about the way I lost him. The specific, extra way.
I used to think I’d simply moved on. That I’d processed the grief efficiently and come out the other side. Now I wonder if what I did was something different — not processing but simply not re-experiencing. The grief was real the day it happened. The weeks after were hard. But then the replay mechanism that would have kept it alive — the involuntary summonings of his voice, his walk, his face at the dinner table — that mechanism was never installed. The grief didn’t fade. It was simply never rebroadcast.
I don’t know if this makes me more healed or less. I don’t know if there’s a difference.
* * *
The second layer is people.
My girlfriend, Ren, is patient when I try to explain all this. She listens. She asks good questions. And then she says, very quietly: “So when I’m not here, you don’t... think about me?”
This is the moment I’ve been dreading. Because the honest answer is complicated, and the simple version of the honest answer sounds terrible.
“I think about you,” I say. “I think about whether you’re having a good day. I think about things I want to tell you.”
“But you don’t, like... miss me.”
I take too long to answer, and the silence says what I can’t.
“It’s not that I don’t love you,” I say.
“I know,” she says. But she pulls her hand back into her lap. She’s looking at the table. The silence between us has a specific weight to it — not anger, something worse. I watch her work through it: the fear that love without missing is something less than love. That proximity is the power supply and if the cable is unplugged the current stops. She’s running the math in her head and the numbers aren’t coming out the way she needs them to.
“It’s not that I don’t —” I start.
“I know,” she says again, harder this time. “I’m not — I’m not saying you don’t love me. I just need a minute.”
So I give her a minute. I sit with her in the quiet and I don’t try to explain, because there’s nothing to explain that would make this easier. This is what it is. I can’t tell her she’s wrong. I can only tell her that the current, when it’s flowing, is real. That when she’s in front of me, she’s the whole world. That this — right now — is not diminished by the fact that tomorrow, when she’s at work, the ache most people carry won’t be there.
After a while, she reaches across and takes my hand. Her fingers are warm and her grip is specific — slightly too tight, the way she always holds on — and I know this about her, I know it as a fact and I feel it as a sensation, and for the moment we’re in the same room and the love is doing what love does when both people are present.
I think about how many couples have navigated this gap without ever knowing it was there.
* * *
The third layer is the one I didn’t expect: my strengths.
Because once you see the architecture of your own mind, you see all of it — not just what’s missing but what’s there. I think in systems. I hold structures in my head — not as pictures, but as felt relationships between parts. This is what makes me good at my work. The code I write is, in some sense, a product of the same mind that can’t picture a beach.
I’d never thought to connect these things before. Now I wonder if the same wiring that doesn’t send images to my conscious mind is part of why abstract patterns come easily. I don’t know. It might be compensation. It might be architecture. It might be a story I’m telling myself because I need the loss to mean something.
But sitting with the question, I notice I wouldn’t trade this mind for a different one. I’d want this mind plus one more thing. I know that’s not how it works.
* * *
And then there is the fourth layer, which is the one without an answer.
Was I always like this?
I read a theory that most children have vivid imagery — that young brains are flooded with connections between regions, and that these connections get pruned as you grow. The children who keep conjuring fantasy worlds keep the pathways alive. The ones who don’t, lose them. If that’s true — was there a fork in my road? A moment when I could have gone one way and went the other — when I started reaching for books instead of daydreams, for concepts instead of pictures, and the unused pathways quietly shut down?
I can’t answer this. And here is the thing that keeps me up at night: I can’t answer it because I can’t remember my childhood. The very condition I’m trying to trace the origins of is the thing preventing me from investigating its origins. It’s a locked room with the key inside. I know I was a child. I know I read a lot. I know my brother, who grew up in the same house, has a mind full of color and cravings and vivid recall. But I can’t get back to the version of me that existed before all this was settled, and I can’t ask that child what he saw when he closed his eyes.
Maybe it’s not that I can’t visualize. Maybe it’s that at some point, for some reason, I stopped. And then the stopping became the architecture. Or maybe there was never a stopping — maybe my brain was always wired this way, the connections between the control room and the projector always thin, and the reading, the abstraction, the conceptual thinking were all downstream of something that was decided before I had any say in it.
I don’t know. I’ll never know. The same mind that needs the answer is the one that can’t retrieve it.
V.
Here is what I know.
I know that my past is a country I’ve heard about but never visited. The border is closed, and there are no photographs inside — only facts, and the past progressive. I used to live there. We used to be happy. She used to sing while she cooked.
I know that the people I love are real to me in the way that gravity is real — I can feel it when I’m in its field, but I cannot feel it at a distance. This is not a lesser love. It’s a differently shaped one. The signal is there. What’s missing is the echo — the thing that would carry the feeling forward through time and across space and keep it humming in my chest when the person has left the room. Ren’s hand in mine is the whole world. Ren’s hand not in mine is the absence of the whole world. Not pain. Just quiet.
I know that I am made, in part, of hundreds of stories I can no longer tell. You are reading one of them now. If you’ve gotten this far without a single picture forming in your mind, if these words have arrived as pure understanding, then for these few minutes you’ve been inside my experience. Welcome. It’s quiet in here.
I know that my mind is good at what it’s good at, and that whatever keeps me from my own past is probably connected to whatever makes me good at my work. I would not trade this mind for a different one. The wish is for this one plus one more thing — but you don’t get to pick which wires to keep.
I know that I will never know whether I was born this way or became it. Maybe everyone starts with a projector and mine was switched off. Maybe mine was never connected. The route is lost, but I’m here.
And I know this: that until a few weeks ago, I lived inside my mind without knowing what it was. I used the word “imagine” and meant something different from everyone around me, and no one noticed, and I didn’t notice, and we went on like that for thirty years. This is not a tragedy. It’s a proof that the words we share are bridges built in fog, and the person sitting next to you right now may be doing something so fundamentally different with their consciousness that the two of you are barely having the same experience of being alive. Rather than frightening me, this fills me with wonder. If something this basic was hidden this long — what else? What other differences are we walking past every day, unnamed?
I sit in my kitchen. The coffee has gone cold. The light through the window has shifted from gray to something warmer — the clouds have moved, or the sun has climbed, or both. I pick up the mug and drink the cold coffee because it’s still coffee and I’m still here.
This is what I have. The present tense. The room I’m sitting in. The cold coffee, the warm light, the hum of the fridge. The knowledge that the people I love exist somewhere beyond these walls, even though I can’t feel them from here. The quiet certainty that I am myself, whatever that means, built from whatever materials were available — words and concepts and patterns and the accumulated residue of experiences I can no longer replay but that left their mark, invisibly, permanently.
The light moves across the counter. I start my day.
fin
If something this basic was hidden this long — what else?
What other differences are we walking past every day, unnamed?
This is something I’ve been fascinated with since a long time. If you’ve observed that your brain works a bit different from other people’s, in what way? I would love to know, please comment below.