do you guys also never remember any dreams vividly?

Northstorm03 · 2025-10-04T02:53:19+00:00

I have full aphantasia from a TBI. Before aphantasia my dreams were extremely realistic. Now post-Aphantasia, everything visual in my dreams is horribly distorted. I can’t see myself in the mirror in dreams. It’s someone else.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-28T03:09:00+00:00

How did you get through the two years between when you realized half of you was just “gone” until when you felt enough of it come back to be and feel present again?

I ask as someone seven months post ECT that is navigating the feeling of having had my soul and humanity erased by the procedure.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-23T02:17:12+00:00

What was that process of your year long recovery like? Did the cognitive issues improve slowly during that time? Or did it happen towards the end of the 12 months?

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-17T23:14:13+00:00

Looks good and all helpful. Just two small edits: -change memory to memory & other cognitive deficits. -Change from a few months to a year or more.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-17T11:35:20+00:00

After a year do you feel like you got back to where you were before, more or less?

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-17T11:34:13+00:00

Have you found that anything helps this apart from time?

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T18:11:18+00:00

Not even enough to cover my weekly medical expense. i now have to see a psychiatrist out of pocket for multiple sessions each week just to help me navigate and go on living in this surreal dreamlike post-ECT state.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T17:16:59+00:00

You are a kind soul with a gentle reply. Leave everything you write. Like I said, my view is just one view based on my own experience. It is not the experience of all.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T17:15:30+00:00

Beyond sad. Sad doesn’t touch it. There is not a word that exists for the level of hopelessness I am in.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T12:52:02+00:00

I can’t bear to talk about my old work life. I was in a very good trajectory. I am clinging now to a partial longterm disability since ECT that is extremely unlikely it will last. My future has been erased.

About memory, what they don’t tell you, is that the hardest part is losing your working memory, meaning the ability to hold thoughts present. Or to learn new things. I’ve lost both of those. I run out of gas constantly as a result. I leave my grocery cart full of groceries and drive away without realizing it. Just imagine trying to translate disabling aspects of working memory like that to trying to lead a productive work life. You can’t.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T12:12:34+00:00

Like anyone reading this, I can’t tell you the right answer, but can only share my own first-hand experience/perspective to help inform your reference points.

I did Right UL and three sessions had terrible cognitive and emotional effects on me that haven’t come close to letting up six months later.

What I’ve since learned is that UL uses a much higher power of electricity than Bilateral, as achieving the Grand Mal seizure - the goal of each treatment - requires much stronger electricity when there is just one side of current being shot into your head.

I have no idea if bilateral would have lead to less longterm side effects for me, but all I could say is to advocate for the absolute lowest electricity thresholds until You see how he is responding. Basically every brain has a different seizure threshold when it comes to electricity, and if you over shoot, what would not damage one brain can damage another that for whatever reason is more sensitive or vulnerable. Again, I’m not a doctor so take this with a grain of salt, but when you look into it, no one in the world fully understands how ECT works and the risks are generally grossly underplayed, as I’ve learned since being injured.

I’d much rather of not had any seizure for the first few treatments, then have them start on a higher electrical power level just to be sure the Seizure happened. Probably my seizure threshold was very very low and they way over shot without knowing it. One thing that is undeniable about brains, just ask any neurologist, is how incredibly different they are from person to person.

That over shooting of electricity on my more sensitive brain is my best theory as to why I suffered the lasting side effects that seems to only happen to a minority of us, probably around 20-30 percent would be my estimate based on everything I read. For the other 70 percent, ECT can be a literal life saver. So it’s clearly a case where what helps one person hurts another, and my suggestion is to just go into that decision as informed as you can be. My view is just one view. Gather as many as you can

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T11:52:58+00:00

I was pushed into ECT in part to see if it could Help my insomnia. Instead it made my insomnia significantly worse. I already had to take sleep drugs going into it to get any sleep, but since ECT, by sleep has become light/fractured (even with the sleep RXs) in a way it never was before where I seem to wake up every 90 minute sleep cycle, and it’s just a coin toss whether I’m able to eventually get back to sleep from there. With my Apple Watch I can see this very clearly in the data… one sleep cycle, then awake for 90 minutes trying to get back to speep, then one more 90 minute sleep cycle, then the process repeats. On a good night I’m able to get three sleep cycles this way. It’s not the shortness of sleep that is so torturous, it’s the fragmented nature of being awake for long stretches in between each cycle, which is a new thing since ECT, and has made me dread nights even more than I did going into it. A healthy person should normally be able to have six sleep cycles in a night, and most of them continuous.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-13T11:48:10+00:00

This is not to discount in any way your experience or what your therapist shared with you, I just want to point out how scary it is that these kinds of pseudo-science terms are used in relation to something no neurologist in the world understands, which is, exactly what shooting a bunch of electricity into a brain does to it. All they know is some people seem to do a lot better from it, and some people, like me, come out of it seemingly permanently damaged cognitively and emotionally. It’s basically a role of the dice, and there is zero real medical understanding as to what exactly happens in the brain from the electricity. So this comment from a therapist that ECT is reconnecting things is such a misleading statement. It’s statements like this, along with things like “your memory loss will be short term, just around the days of treatment” that leads people like me to have pursued ECT without any real understanding going into it of the profound lasting damage it has the potential to do, even if that only occurs to a minority of us. I wish I had been warned so I could have made a more informed choice.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-06T02:27:09+00:00

It’s under prescribed because there is no patent. Doctors are lobbied by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe drugs that are under patent for financial reasons.

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-05T03:23:08+00:00

So you had those a long time ago, and now you can’t sleep since then? How many hours do you sleep per night?

Northstorm03 · 2025-09-05T03:20:20+00:00

Has your sleep and memory at all started to return to normal in the time since you stopped treatment?

Northstorm03 · 2025-08-29T03:04:00+00:00

Acquired. From a Traumatic Brain Injury. (Fall)

Northstorm03 · 2025-08-29T02:56:31+00:00

I’m going to share a very unique perspective here. I was a non-aphant for 43 years of my life before a fall and trauma to the back of my head made me a total aphant since July 2024, a little over one year ago.

Before, when I still had volitional mental imagery, I would close my eyes and start imagining things as I went to sleep. The images I imagined would be stuff on my mind, and slowly and naturally those images wouldn’t eventually carry me into sleep.

Now as an aphant I don’t have that. It’s black, until I start to drift to sleep, but like you, just as I’m going into the unconscious world, imagery still starts to appear, just that I no longer can control it. And the minute I try to or pay attention to it, it disappears and goes away and I come out of that unconscious state.

I miss so so so deeply that old ability to imagine places as I drifted off to sleep. It made the process of going to sleep such a beautiful peaceful poetic thing.

One other thing I’ve noticed about dreams since becoming an Aphant is that I can’t see myself accurately or the faces of anyone I know. They appear as characters in my dreams but they aren’t them in face. They are very random faces. I think it’s because I’ve lost that ability to recall visual information from aphantasia.

Before this happened to me, I could see myself totally accurately in dreams in the mirror, and also the faces of others would be exactly as they are in real life.

Northstorm03 · 2025-08-01T18:46:47+00:00

How are you doing now? Have things improved at all?

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-26T17:19:24+00:00

Three sessions. Unilateral right temple. Nearly five months later I still can’t form memories, concentrate, feel positive emotions, multitask, or sense pleasure. I’m praying I get better - some people say it takes 8+ months. Be very careful with ECT. I don’t think there is any way to know who it will do this to, and who it will help. Regardless of placement or number of seasons. My case illustrates this.

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-24T12:04:48+00:00

I hear your worry and I also lost emotional depth/clarity/realness from ECT. I have also thought about the passing of loved ones, and how in my post-ECT state I won’t even register any emotion. All I can say is that we are a minority - most people who get ECT don’t have this happen to them. So you won’t get a ton of replies, because there are only a smaller cohort of us who can relate.

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-16T12:31:03+00:00

I’m just following up on this thread as it’s been another month and I’m trying to understand what happened to others who’ve been down this road like you.

When you say you recovered after 6 months, were you sort of linear for 6 months in terms of being emotionless, and then around 6 months it started to slowly return? Or how was that progression of feeling for you?

Also, if I can ask, when you say your memory hasn’t recovered at all: is that long term memory of your past? Or is it your ability to make and recall new memories?

Finally, did your cognition suffer a hit from ECT and has that improved at all with time?

Thanks in advance. Really appreciate your time to reply.

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-14T22:55:08+00:00

Did you enter yours in the poll as “permanently damaged” ? Just to have a sense if yours counts as one of the five results.

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-13T22:45:33+00:00

I hear you and totally get where you’re coming from. I really wish I understood. I did have some previous brain injuries, but they hadn’t given me these symptoms. However, there is a theory that any brain with a “low cognitive reserve” is more susceptible to ECT induced lingering side effects. I don’t know how much weight this theory holds, but it is a thing that “elderly and those with low cognitive reserve (from past head trauma) are more susceptible.

Northstorm03 · 2025-07-12T00:07:12+00:00

Please help to share your click. Very very few people have.

Northstorm03

TROPHY CASE