I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.

My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.

It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.

One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.

After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.

It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.

I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.

Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!

I'm also aphantasic and dream normally.

I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.

In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.

I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)

I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.

I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.

My lucid dreaming has always been when I'm in danger, like this description of a Sadako dream

https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...

So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)

Interesting to me that three different people have responded with the same "I'm also aphantasic and dream normally" start to their message.

I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.

"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.

Question for visualizers: is imagery held steady in your dream, or does it constantly shift and morph?

I’m aphantasic and like I’ve seen many people report here, I can kinda almost conjure up images but can’t hold them steady even for a microsecond. It immediately disintegrates and can’t be brought back.

In my dreams the imagery always shifts, but not in the same way. It’s held enough to be recognizable before changing into some other random nonsense like happens in dreams.

(I dreamt last night a StarCraft 2 YouTuber I follow was spamming raven auto-turrets over some people from a helicopter, which they shot down with a machine gun, and the youtuber survived the crash but he didn’t look at all like himself and that confused me, but we were in an Italian castle, and I was hiding from gangsters, but my boss had traveled to Italy and we were in a hospital where he was getting “torso reduction” and I put my hand on the small of his back, and it was my wife)

shikantaza (zen meditation, basically) has significantly improved my ability to visualize.