I have the same problem losing both the temporary hypnagogic visualization and lucid dreams, rare as the latter even are for me: it’s so easy to do something silly, like pay too much attention to it or get excited about it, and BAM, it’s been destroyed.

I did have one occasion where the hypnagogic thing had mild success when I tried to imagine something non-stationary, in this case sort of watching landscape go by as if I were in a car watching it through gaps between concrete pillars in a bridge railing.

Good to know, re: hypnagogia. I’ve occasionally tried experimenting with it when I think to, while floating near sleep. I’ve weirdly found that moving my eyes certain ways, or focusing my eyes to certain distances, while I’m near sleep (eyes closed) can make it feel very suddenly like I can see something. My intent was to find what seemed to work in that state and see if I could use such techniques while more awake, but if you’re right, then that presumably won’t be as successful as I’d hoped.

I wrote this up for another comment, so I’ll put it as a reply to yours, too, so you get a notification about it:

In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.

As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:

Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.

Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).

One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.

Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.

If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.

Yeah, for some folks aphantasia comes with weakness/absence of other kinds of imagination, like audio or spatial, and for others it doesn’t. I feel like I have a decent sense of audio imagination - I can “play back” a memory of a song, and my experience is like a ghost of hearing. It is as though there is a second set of ears somewhere in my head that doesn’t “feel” the same as originally hearing it, but elements of the song I never really thought much of - maybe an audio glitch in the recording or a quirk of the voice or some non-instrument sound effect - also play back as just part of this “flat”, single-layer stream.

I never really thought much until now that I might have a duller audio imagination than others, because what I do have is at least closer to the experience of hearing than my spatial sense is to seeing.

In my time, I have played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons (and other such games), including “running” as a Game Master. The planning and narrating of locations is something I feel like would be greatly benefitted by having actual visual imagination. When I learned about aphantasia as a thing (and came to realize that when people talked about picturing something in their head, they were being a lot more literal than I realized was possible), one friend of mine wondered how I could do what I’ve done running those games, describing places aloud from my head, etc. without visual imagination. I said I don’t know, but that he should consider how much better it might have been if I could picture things.

As far as maybe getting you closer to my experience:

Look at some table or other small pieces of furniture near you. Think about what you are doing with normal visual processing - your eyes are getting simple brightness/color signals from incoming photons.

Those get sent to your brain, and a few layers of processing happen - this region is square or rhombus shaped, this region is darker, this part is narrow and tall. Another layer maybe predicts the parts you can’t see and gives you a sense of the table’s thickness at various points (legs, main surface).

One layer/process considers how the trapezoid shape you see as the surface is actually a square/rectangle, and the apparent width changes based on the distance of that part of the table. All this happens without you having to think much about it, and you end up with not just a simple map of “this square is dark brown, this trapezoid is grayish” but a sense of a whole complex object.

Now, take that multi-layered sense of the table and try to focus just on the physical shape of it, your sense of where each part exists in space. Try to “imagine”/consider the table as an object you sense the presence and shape of, and then also imagine it to be invisible. You still know it’s there, you have awareness of where you could walk without hitting it, how you could crawl under it, how far you should lower an object in your hand before letting it go so as to set it on the table rather than either dropping it or slamming it down.

If any of that clicked for you, that probably approximates the experience of non-visually imagining something solely spatially. Basically, everything the visual experience would tell you about the object, except now pretend it’s invisible.

Speaking only from my own experience as someone with almost-total aphantasia (I definitely dream visually, and when I get very tired I can sometimes see fleeting things with my eyes closed, with almost no control over what), I have found I have a very strong spatial memory and imagination. When someone asks me to imagine an apple, I get no picture, but I can still have awareness of/can sense its shape and position relative to me. I can feel a shape spin in my head. It’s as though there is some particular step between “add the object to the environment, conceptually” and “render the object” that doesn’t happen for me.

I have this vague recollection from one or two earlier playthroughs that during one of the mission maps, some cloaked dudes show up, theres some Ashley/Mr. Riggs dialogue, and you suddenly can use Cloak. Separate from scanning enough of them to unlock the tech/blueprint. Tried Googling and couldn’t find anything about that, though I feel like I went on this journey once before and got reminded of the mission thing from some website.

Hey, did Camo unlock in your playthrough with this update? I started with coop_beta and have since gone back to the main branch after the update, and the tech and blueprint unlocked, but I can’t actually select it.

Please stop me from building over-defended walls at the far borders of the entire map and using a consistent 4x4 grid placement for flooring that aligns the entire gotdamn map…

Edit: said map

I mean, that’s his job, right? Like, his one definite real job? He’s “ready”? I should fucking hope so.

Batman wasn’t a fan of their privacy practices, even in the 60s.

I don’t keep up with any of this stuff, and so it just makes me think of memes like this:

What is a weapon for, if not to allay fear?

Wait, isn’t China the really big one east of Europe?

As an American who grew up on its proclaimed hegemony and superiority, yes, please. I think there is really something to the idea of “The American spirit” once you strip away the toxic cultures of individualism, corporatism, and blind self-aggrandizing; we were lied (propogandized) to for decades about being “the best”, and the result is some folks who would do awesome things if the fucking societal compass of this place could be directed toward real social and societal good. You know, equity, progress, a sense of self-preservation when it comes to the climate/environment…

For your consideration.