On the Difference Between Imagination and Fantasy
I’m going to try to keep this short and simple.
There is such a thing as aphantasia. The inability to imagine. I had always presumed everyone had some capacity to imagine, but apparently this is not true. The source from which I heard this was one of the presenters of the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast. He has aphantasia — which would explain part of his obsession with facts, accumulating them. Facts can exist without the ability or need to imagine them. I’ve listened to enough of this podcast to know this presenter has no essential problem with extrapolation. For example: if he were to hear of certain mining techniques he could extrapolate these same principals to science fiction levels. Like the suggestion of pulling methane by suction out of one of the pools that form on Saturn’s moon Titan — Or if someone tells you what an elf is supposed to be, now you no longer need imagination to conjure it. It can exist as a word and a description. An elf has pointy ears, an elf is pale green etc.
I’ve always been curious as to why major fantasy narratives always seem to use the same players. Dwarves and giants and dragons. Especially dragons. If the imagination of the author can come up with anything, any new random type of entity, why are there so many dragons in fantasy? This answer may have multiple parts, but a large piece of the puzzle is probably that there are certain restrictions to imagination. Namely, that very few people actually have a lot of it.
This was the first thing that caught my attention about the notion of aphantasia. If someone can have no imagination — this means a continuum has always existed. I had presumed that the primary quirk of imagination was training, being bored, forcing yourself to imagine. Now I have serious doubts. One can look to fantasy and see endless repetition in our “imaginations”. Science fiction and fantasy — by and large — use pre-established physical metrics available to our senses and physical reality. If a set piece or character is used that is beyond our physical reality (dragons) it is so well ingrained into the collective unconscious (to use a Jungian term) that descriptions of it are passable as a type of reality. Walking and talking trees, or hyper-intelligent bugs — these are ideas that take from our reality and extrapolate. My suspicion is that for fantasy; one doesn’t actually need imagination at all. What makes a series like Lord of the Rings popular has more to do with mythology and hierarchy. Good and evil. And yes it certainly conjures images, but most of which are as about as fantastical as a walk in the woods (if one stops and pays attention to insect life etc).
Well, so what is imagination then? Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This sounds like a simplification. But to truly put yourself in a headspace other than your own is one of the most difficult and complex things to do. It’s so complex that by the time one is an adult most people don’t even bother to try.
A little tangential but over the past few months I’ve been running experiments on my evenings out at the bar. I try and find a variety of people and ask them questions. Sometimes, if they’re chatty, it will be a far reaching conversation — and yet; on supremely rare occasions have I ever been asked a question in return. You can run this experiment yourself. You may even notice in relationships you’ve already established how rarely you will be truly asked a question.
My suspicion, then, is not only is empathy difficult — there is a literal biological component. If aphantasia means not being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes, this means it is literally impossible for that person to have empathy. They can project empathetic ideals (the fantasy ideals). Societal standards, norms or models. They understand projecting empathy looks good and does something for the health of the community — which ends up benefiting them as well. But in terms of actually understanding what it might be like to be someone else, very few have this interest prioritized.
Is this because they literally don’t have the biological components necessary for this act? This is my growing suspicion. What this implies is both far ranging and, frankly, obscure in context. The continuum of empathy is like the continuum of sexuality. Interesting but deeply personal and contextual. Where are the places or situations in which imagination is very useful? I find the comparison to sexuality apropos because, other than literal procreation, what is the use of sex? Biological efficiency puts emphasis on the essentials. Aphantasia is likely closer to the norm if one considers, as I am arguing here, that imagination is largely non-essential.
A classic continuum of imagination would put an excess of imagination at one end and aphantasia, or complete lack of imagination at the other.
It is more likely that imagination spreads outward from a base zero imaginative capacity. Excessive imagination being the obscure poles. Poles which are weirdly opposed to each other. Labeling them I would describe one as ‘writer’ and the other ‘therapist’. I think now of the dislike Nabokov had for Freud. Maybe this is not such a “narcissism of small differences” and a rather active versus passive sense at true imagination. The psychoanalyst having the sense of active empathy — rather delusional about their powers for the moment.
The writer, in comparison, also delusional, but delusional to the inevitable truth created through passive expression. The therapist doesn’t trust anyone’s ability to create real characters and the writer doesn’t trust reality as a good indicator for the allegorical capacities of imagination.
Look into this further? God, no, I am a writer — and not of the masochistic variety.
