Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

I have a sense of how things are located spatially and can recall features of things I have verbally described to myself, but there is no way I can see anything that's not before my eyes.

Not sure if that's related, but I have a very bad sense of direction, especially when driving. I'll need to take the same route a dozen of times before I can stop relying on my GPS.

I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both moves it and turns it to face the same direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this "model" whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I'd picture myself in the third person, give myself an "origin point", and then visualize where I'd be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the origin.

(All this was without actually 'picturing' anything, in the traditional sense. Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it'll feel different when you're trying to add yaw if the "south" side of the cube is the one facing you, vs. the "east" side or the "bottom" side. Now imagine that the cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands. Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.)

One interesting effect of this is that I've found that I now get "acclimated" to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where north is in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot while navigating, and so my "origin point" becomes fixed to North, such that I begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city, with streets running "up-down" instead of north-south and "left-right" instead of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of "I'm facing up" when I'm facing north.

On the other hand, when I'm in a city I haven't acclimated to, man do I miss that sensation; I get completely lost.

I said vague and dim for most of them, but it feels like fleeting glimpses of bits more than anything else. I can't really imagine coloured objects, though I sort of label an object as coloured. Geometric arrangements are easy to imagine but I don't have a real picture. I have no problems imagining sound, music or voices. I'm not sure if I dream in pictures and rarely remember dreams. (I work in science)

In fact, I often know I'm about to drift off to sleep when the music in my head starts getting interesting. My dreams are often very intense, visual/audio experiences with plots and special effects, like AAA Hollywood movies.

I'll often wake up when the brass section of my mental orchestra gets too loud and I'll hear the last few beats repeating over and over as I gain consciousness.

I've actually found the multi-media/search aspects of modern chat systems very helpful since I can often reply what I'm thinking by just searching for a picture that represents my thoughts instead of writing out words.

I'm also absolutely terrible with directions on roads, but quite good inside of large complex buildings (my wife is the opposite).

One thought, instead of "giving in" to this fact, I wonder if exercising it might do something. Perhaps take some community sketching classes and work on drawing to see if exercising the unused visualization areas of your mind might activate them?