In which I begin to lay out the terms hyperphantasic and aphantasic and what they mean. Developing and working with mental imagery, and without it. Creativity emerging from the unconscious.
Working with mental imagery or the lack of it—digging into hyperphantasia and aphantasia
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I just ran across an idea that spiked my fascination factor. In fact it's something I've seen mention of in many of my favorite subjects, such as visual art, writing, lucid dreaming, and mysticism.
I was reading a recent book about William Blake, the English poet and artist (also a mystic) and ran across 2 words that are new to me: Aphantasic and Hyperphantasic. The words themselves are unfamiliar, but I can see they're both built around the root word from which we get phantom, phantasm and fantasy—all of which refer to imagery. Apparently Blake himself was hyperphantasic—able to see detailed mental imagery in his mind's eye. In fact he was what's commonly known as a visionary artist, one who sees such imagery and then basically copies it down on paper or canvas. Or in his case mostly as etchings to illustrate his books of poetry.
I was somewhat familiar with the concept already from reading about Frank Frazetta, an artist popular in the 60's and 70's for exceptionally vivid paintings on the covers of paperback fantasy books such as Conan and John Carter of Mars. Frazetta was so popular that in fact he's credited with single-handedly causing a massive boom in the publishing of such books. As soon as his work went on the cover of one it sold out rapidly. There's been a lot written about him and his working methods—one recurring theme of which is that he had the ability to form powerfully vivid imagery in his mind, to visualize an image in detail, and then put it down in pencil or paint. He also said he was able to look at something—a photograph, painting, or a model posing in front of him, and remember the image with great clarity for a very long time, like months if not years. As an art student myself this felt like a super power or a cheat code. Those of us who don't have this ability have to struggle long and hard to memorize for instance the proportioning and anatomy of the human figure. He breezed through those things very rapidly. Before learning about these categories I always just assumed he had an eidetic or photographic memory, but he himself said that's not true. I don't think these terms were available at the time, at least not to the general public. But now I understand much better what was going on in his head and his art.
A visual impression—a detailed mental image of something you've seen—was known in the time of Aristotle as a phantasm. Something like a mental ghost, a thing that has no physical existence but is strictly of the imagination. In fact, interestingly, the very word imagination is rooted in the word image. To imagine something is to form a mental image of it. The word magic also stems from image. A mage or magician is someone with a powerful abilty to work with mental imagery and use that to manipulate physical reality.
I also ran across similar ideas when I was studying lucid dreaming. The researcher who became the first great popularizer of it—Stephen LaBerge—referred frequently to techniques used by Tibetan monks for what they called The Yogas of Dream and Sleep. In fact there's a book by that name that contains some really excellent techniques for developing a facility with mental imagery. They begin with looking at some simple image or object, nothing very detailed, and staring at it for a long time while meditating, then closing your eyes and concentrating on seeing it in the mind's eye. As your ability grows you begin to look at more detailed images or objects.
In the book that inspired this post, called William Blake vs The World by John Higgs, it's said that throughout history practitioners of what is now known as hyperphantasia have often begun with sexual fantasy. Blake himself was a very sex-oriented man, and that's probably something he did a lot of, but it's known that he had the ability even as a very young child. Higgs seems highly knowedgeable about hyper- and a-phantasia. Apparently the terms didn't come into common scientific use, and weren't the subjects of much study at all, until around 2015, so this is an exciting new field of knowledge. Though as is often the case artists and thinkers throughout history have known about it and discussed it in great depth. It just takes science a long time to get interested in certain subjects.
It might sound like hyperphantasia would give someone a massive boost in creativity, but that's not really the case. It certainly does give them certain advantages, but probably also some disadvantages, and people incapable of forming and working directly with mental imagery have become excellent artists and writers. They just use somewhat different techniques—a sort of patching-together of a lot of other kinds of sensory impulses. I'll discuss this in greater detail in later posts.
Another field of interest that brought me up against these subjects is Jungian psychology. Jung was a visionary himself and a mystic (as many of them are). The technique he developed for getting near-immediate access to unconscious contents is called Active Imagination and consists of looking at a dimly-lit wall in a semi-dark room while in a meditative state and letting imagery form. Personally I'm convinced he would sometimes fall asleep and go directly into lucid dreaming, but he didn't know much about it at the time. He was famous for his dream interpretation techniques, and of course dreams give access to the unconscious itself. He was looking for something similar to dreaming but that wasn't just random, that allowed for some direct manipulation by the 'dreamer', and he found active imagination did the trick.
Consider all of this just a precursor by way of introduction. As usual I'll be delving deeper into these ideas in future blog posts. There's been some talk on the board now and then about characters 'coming alive' in a writer's head, taking on a life of their own so to speak. Many of mine do this, and I've developed some techniques for it. Since running across these ideas of hyperphantasia and aphantasia and reading a chapter of the Blake book dedicated to it, I have some new ideas forming that I want to explore. I'll also be doing some research into related subjects.
I'm looking forward to what I learn about this—it's exciting to know there's now some scientific literature to dig into about it. Though quite possibly the best information will come from artists, visionaries, and mystics of the past.Categories:Tags:J.T. Woody and Not the Territory like this.
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