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fog / haze / fuzzy / blurry / vague

Counts (from regex pre-pass)

These counts include literal mentions, not just metaphors. The classification below is from agent reading of a 30-chunk sample.

Classification of the sample

Bucket Count
Genuine metaphor (cognition / memory / experience) 26
Literal mention 0
Edge / ambiguous 4

Genuine metaphor sub-uses

Degraded imagery — the hypophantasia signature

By far the dominant sub-use. Posters describe imagery that is present but degraded: shapes without colour, shapes that disappear when looked at, outlines that "have smoke around them," images that flash and fade. This is the linguistic home of self-identifying hypophantasic and borderline-aphantasic users.

"If I imagine a green circle I don't think I can see it but I can imagine it, then it's a very blurry circle, it's like there is smoke around it and I can't decide the size or anything else." 2024 · t1_lw10moj ↗

"I describe it as a blurry, highly transparent pane of painted glass with few details that gets briefly flashed in front of my mind’s eye and cannot be examined or paused." 2024 · t1_lbk4kjw ↗

"A vague, blurry, general idea of what it looks like, that will disappear the second my focus strays even a little bit." 2022 · t1_ijba6fi ↗

"usually my capabilities in visualization is limited to vague greyish shapes, although I can force a very small amount of color and a little detail." 2022 · t1_j0xgl1o ↗

Hypophantasia-worse-than-aphantasia — distress at the in-between

A subset of these posters describe the degraded-imagery state as more distressing than reported pure absence: the imagery is bad enough to taunt them but not good enough to use. This is the subtype the brief flagged.

"Maybe if you feel like you see dark, blurry figures you have r/Hypophantasia , but that is a community term and as far as I can tell, most researchers would put you in the aphant group, not the visualizer group." 2025 · t1_ng5rurs ↗

"We're just in that vague sort of borderline zone where we don't really understand either side's perspective entirely." 2021 · t1_gyw7scp ↗

"so many people can picture some stuff but it will be black and white or fuzzy with little to no detail. It isn’t just aphants and the rest of the world with perfect minds eyes. Everything exists in between." 2025 · t1_marevw8 ↗

Vague memories / blurry recall

A smaller strand uses fog-family terms about memory rather than imagery — recall as fuzzy, shape-without-detail. Often paired with SDAM-adjacent descriptions.

"most of my memories are blurry. one memory I can pretty clearly recall is when I got sick while staying at my half sister's place" 2021 · t1_hjm5tbo ↗

"By concepts. Idk how else to explain, but not image, sometimes sound and blurry colors." 2020 · t1_fwlszyt ↗

"they're vivid and colorful but not detailed. very blurry. i cant recall the objects, faces, colors becouse i didnt seen them or remember. they are concepts." 2022 · t1_iywxced ↗

"Brain fog" — fog as cognitive slowness, not visual degradation

A separate metaphorical use: fog as the obscuring of thought, not of mental imagery. These posts often discuss aphantasia and ADHD/depression overlap.

"I thought it might be an interesting thing to keep in mind when talking about brain fog. I purposely omitted the positive subtypes as they have no relevance here." 2023 · t1_jjb9skc ↗

What this family tells us about aphantasia phenomenology

This is plausibly the home of the hypophantasia-worse-than-aphantasia subtype the brief flagged. Where the black/blank family lets aphants describe an absence cleanly, the fog/haze/fuzzy family describes the in-between: imagery that is present but unusable. The same posters often describe this with active frustration ("disappears the second my focus strays," "cannot be examined or paused," "if I lose the image of the brown dresser") that the pure-absence reports do not contain. The metaphor reveals a phenomenology where control is the missing variable as much as detail — images can flicker into view but cannot be held, queried, or zoomed. The metaphor fails when posters use "vague" or "blurry" loosely about memory, concepts, or even abstract ideas, blurring three different cognitive deficits into one word.

False-positive notes

This sample had no clean literal mentions. Four chunks were edge cases: posters using "vague" about emotional concepts ("vague concepts like emotions"), about creativity ("when a person sees something blurry, he do not see instantly"), or about borderline phenomenology in general ("vague sort of borderline zone"). These are all still metaphorical, just not about imagery. Compared with the black/blank family, fog/haze/fuzzy has a much higher genuine-metaphor share because the regex words (fog, haze, fuzzy, blurry, vague) almost never refer to literal weather or eyesight in this subreddit's discourse. An honest re-count of the 6,079 raw matches would likely keep 80-90% in the genuine-metaphor bucket — making this family smaller in volume than black/blank/void but considerably more reliable as a phenomenological signal.

What this answers and doesn't