Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".

I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!

I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.

"...choose to see black" :)

Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...

High five brother, I find these threads fascinating, because even within the group of people who have hyperphantasia like this, our experiences differ wildly.

"Describe smells by how they look" - that's synesthesia maybe! A bridge too far for me - I'm more likely to describe what the situation I was in when I smelled a given scent most memorably, rather than how the scent looks.

I also explain things verbally by referencing an internal picture and describing it, and find tacit knowledge very difficult to express in that vein.