It means “no imagination”, but the truth is we’ve plenty of imagination, just not visually.
It’s not a coincidence that the word image is in the word imagination. Most people image to imagine.
We have learned you don’t need to image to imagine. If you would have asked me awhile ago if I saw images in my head I would have said yes because I can hold details of an image in my head and “see” it. It’s like I’m imagining an image to imagine.
Just like I can imagine what would happen if you placed a ball at the top of a hill and let go. I don’t need to see images or a video to “imagine” the ball is going to roll down the hill.
Phantasia is a word used by Aristotle to describe “mental images”. What is thought of as “imagining”. He described it as a mind’s eye.
Imagining is the term that is wrongly named. It could be used for only processing thinking with images but like you said you “imagine”. I have aphantasia and I’m just “thinking” about the ball and it rolling down the hill, not imaging it doing it in my head.








I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t fully understand hypnosis.
I don’t really dream that much. I normally fall asleep and then just wake up. I’ve had dreams before and I can’t say that I saw images or not. I want to say that I did see images because I would describe them as being very vivid and real like almost like I was experiencing it rather than just thinking. But when I wake up I cannot recall any of the images but know how the things in the dream looked and would recall them like I saw something in the real world.
But if my muscles are relaxed how is that supposed to put my brain in a relaxed state?