Hopes for treatment, changes in imagery

The hope of "unlocking" mental imagery runs through this subreddit, but the evidence is almost entirely first-person anecdote — vivid, contradictory, and easy to mistake for proof.

Is there even something to cure?

The community is split before the question of treatment even arrives: some treat aphantasia as a neutral variant, others want it gone tomorrow.

"Nothing to cure, just a different way of processing information" 2024 · t1_lp36o8y ↗

"it's not a disease to be cured" 2026 · t1_ogewg3m ↗

"i dont know if curing it is possible, but if there was a cure i'd probably take it. I'd rather not have aphantasia, but its not like a constant thought." 2023 · t1_j61e0sy ↗

"Wtf you on about.....ofc want it cured" 2026 · t1_o571gdu ↗

"Some people appear to have been cured"

The strongest hope-shaped claims in the corpus are framed cautiously, as analogies and hedges rather than evidence. The argument here is that a cure can't be ruled out — not that one exists.

"There’s no proof that aphantasia can’t be cured. The list of things once considered to be impossible that are now taken for granted is huge.

Even “We don’t know how to cure aphantasia” is overstated. Some people appear to have been cured.

We don’t even really understand aphantasia. It comes in SO many varieties and degrees. Can going from total darkness to occasional voluntary but mostly dim, blurry images be considered cured or at least partially so? I think so, because it holds promise for more." 2024 · t1_ki0tk7i ↗

"I'm sure there will be a cure someday, once this goes mainstream and we understand it better. But currently, no cure" 2018 · t1_e26sq2y ↗

"There isn't a cure." 2021 · t1_h498iq4 ↗

No published study describes an aphant being moved into normal voluntary imagery; the reports above are individual self-assessments, mostly of partial change.

Psychedelics: vivid, involuntary, mostly not "visualisation"

The psychedelic threads are the most dramatic and the most over-claimed. The careful readers in the same threads keep drawing the same line: hallucination is not voluntary visualisation.

"Dmt Is amazing. You can actually see things. Once i had an entity ask me why I could not see things in my head and then gave me the ability to visualise for 5 minutes. Was amazing." 2023 · t1_kbao16m ↗

"DMT is the only one that ever made me see things" 2022 · t1_idb2pft ↗

"LSD & Mushrooms. No visualisations, but changes in reality with my eyes open." 2022 · t1_idbbzse ↗

"I can't visualise unfortunately. However psychedelics do cause me to hallucinate, I see pattern overlays and colour changes with my eyes open and colours, kaleidoscopes, patterns, eyes, snakes, faces, symbols etc with my eyes closed. Hallucinating is separate from visualising, that I've never been able to do even at the peak" 2023 · t1_jjm71qn ↗

"Yes I've had eyes closed visuals on psychedelics but I wouldn't say it's quite the same as visualising on purpose. To start with, some visualisations are just geometrical shapes and colors, patterns, but they aren't representing anything." 2023 · t1_j8m3z13 ↗

The pattern: drug-induced perceptual events are real and often striking, but most reporters distinguish them from voluntary mental imagery. The "five minutes of visualisation from a DMT entity" stories are the loudest and the rarest. There are no controlled trials of psychedelics for aphantasia in this corpus or in the wider research literature; everything here is recreational self-report.

Trying to learn it

Practice and meditation come up often, with mixed and modest results.

"I had some success. It does work. It took me about a week to get something. But it was a definite and noticeable change." 2020 · t1_fhkcgyq ↗

"For some people visualisation is trainable, for some it isn't. Just try, experience and learn! Good luck!" 2021 · t1_gymgnzc ↗

"I am not sure if learning to visualise is possible for everyone. Meditation doesn't have to involve any visualisation skills to become an expert in it." 2021 · t1_gyxld1e ↗

"Possibly r/hyperphantasia might have some better answers for you since they can actually visualise stuff. I think they often have people trying to learn to be better visualisers over there." 2019 · t1_em32b45 ↗

Synthesis

Three currents run alongside each other on this question. The first is philosophical — whether aphantasia is a deficit in need of fixing at all, with the same threads producing both "no disease to cure" and "ofc want it cured." The second is the psychedelic strand: vivid, repeatable, and almost entirely involuntary, with the more careful posters insisting that hallucination on DMT or LSD is a different mechanism from voluntary imagery and shouldn't be sold as a treatment. The third is the slow, practical hope of training, where the most credible reports are of going from total blackness to occasional dim, blurry images — change, but not transformation.

What's striking is how thin the evidence is on every branch. Every "cure" claim in this pool is anecdotal; every psychedelic visualisation story is uncontrolled self-report; every training success is a sample of one. The honest position the corpus arrives at, mostly without saying it directly, is the one in chunk 9b3aa6fab8693816876e: we don't know enough about aphantasia yet to know what change is possible. For a more grounded view of what has actually been studied — imagery training protocols, drug effects, and where the published evidence ends — see /research/07_interventions.md.