I Can't Imagine What That's Like.

Warming Up

8069/21000

My 21,000 day on this planet (unless I've done the maths wrong or made a mistake in the numbering along the way). I'd be happy with just 21,000 more. I am not greedy. Actually let's make it a round 50,000. If I am still alive then I will bow out on my own.

I am also 57 and a half today, so that means my 42,000 day should basically fall on my 115th birthday. What a double celebration that will be! Although that joy will be tempered by the fact that I have a mere 8000 days left in this world, just under 22 years. Shit, if I am going to live until I am 137 then I might as well go the whole hog and go out on my 150th birthday. Hopefully by blowing up the world and taking all you fuckers with me.

Thanks to Derek Manchubb (may not be his real name) who has created this tribute to the wonderful Simon Quinlank. We'll try and get them in the shops in 1995 as soon as we can. They will sell badly enough that any left in their packages today will be worth millions. We wrote the words, but the actor Kevin Eldon was the one who made that character. Drink your weak lemon drink now. Or you can save it til later.

A few people sent me this article on aphantasia today.

I didn't realise I suffered from this condition until lockdown when I saw a tweet by comedian Bethany Black, asking me to imagine an apple and to think about what I saw in my mind. I saw nothing. It was the worst thing that happened to me in lockdown. I couldn't even picture my cancerous testicle.

Up until that point I think I would have told you that I was fully capable of imagining things, but it turns out my brain doesn't work in the way most people's brains work and what I am doing is getting a vague sense of anything I am thinking about. If I try to think of my kids' faces I get the briefest shimmering idea of them, like they're reflected on a pond and the pond is behind me, out of my direct eye line. I know what they look like - I don't have face blindness, though do sometimes struggle to remember people which may or may not be due to aphantasia - but I can't bring them or anything into sharp focus as an image in my mind. All I see is blackness.

Sometimes when I am falling asleep I get random images popping into my brain, occasionally, for an instant, in the dazzling multi-coloured clarity that I suspect some of you experience with all your thoughts, but usually murky and vague. I can dream as well as anyone and that's when the cinema of my brain comes into its own. But aside from that, my mental projector is busted. The images are being created, it seems, but no one has put the screen up.

Why do the rest of you even bother doing anything when you have a fucking Holodeck in your brain? Why bother watching films when you can create and star in your own stories? Why waste time on porn or having relationships when you can do any filthy thing you can think of, with anyone you desire, inside your own noggin? And mainly why ever look at an apple when you can see an image of an apple at will? Assuming you've looked at one before.

I would very much like to have a normal brain, or at least one of the brains that all the other comedians where they have some kind of condition that garners sympathy and support. No on cares if you can't imagine an apple. But I care that I can't.

Every time someone sends me an article about this (which they always do) I hope it will be one which will have a cure, but there's no cure for aphantasia. Some people claim to have found some success with hallucinogenic drugs, but I don't feel like I want to go down that route. I did try a regime which promised to give results a few years back. I can't remember exactly what it involved now, but I think it was just closing your eyes and waiting to see what appeared and to attempt to them describe it. Various splodges and murky moving objects or the sensation of motion does happen during this, but it started to make me feel a bit sick and also like my mind was drifting away from me a bit. I guess I just have to stick with thinking in the way that I think and imagining the way that I do.

I also don't know if I've always had aphantasia. My memory has always been so good and my recall very quick (at least until middle age really hit) and I seem to remember being able to picture pages of books when I was revising for exams and trying to count sheep when I couldn't sleep, but perhaps I was still just imagining them in the way I do now and just imagined that I imagining images. I really didn't twig that I wasn't until I actively tried to.

Trauma can result in you losing the ability to form images, but did I have any trauma? If I did I have forgotten about it. And you'd think I would have noticed the difference between active and inactive image making if I'd once had it and then it went away.

If you're a scientist working on a cure and you find one, please get in touch with me first. We can make a documentary about it. It will be like when they give a baby who has never heard anything a hearing aid. Imagine my little face. Sadly I am unable to.

I wouldn't mind really if you just fixed up a projector outside of my head and rewired my brain so that my thoughts projected on to that. Though it might be weird/embarrassing if other people could then view them. And I would be quickly arrested. That seems like it might be the answer though. I broke my last laptop's screen by standing on it, but I can still use the computer if I link it up to a projector or a screen. And I am able to put whatever is on my phone on TV at the press of a button. So surely it's not beyond science to have a pocket sized screen that an aphantasiac can carry in their pocket and then when they want to think of something it appears on the screen and they can look it and thus see what they are imagining. Might take this idea to Dragon's Den and see if they'll give me the funding to look into this.

It doesn't seem fair that I live my life with such a disability and don't even get a free parking permit as a result or any kind of benefit or sympathy or be able to use it for excusing my behaviour - other than maybe explaining why I didn't recognise you or was unable to work out which flat plan would fold together to make a cube (the only thing on IQ tests that I was shit at).

The only pleasure I have in life is to publicise aphantasia so that other people like me, who were living in blissful ignorance, discover that they have it too and thus their lives feel empty and ruined. Can we even really call it life if you can't imagine things? Why has God cursed me?