Form of Synesthesia?

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Ok, I don't know if this is normal or not.

When I hear music, I see a scene. Different music elicits different scenes, but I always have a vivd color moving scene in my mind.
Examples:
- Some classical - I see numbers moving along a 3-d cartesian coordinate plane. It's blue.
- Drums - horses galloping in green grass on a cloudy day. White horses with black hooves
- Piano - either water ripples, leaves blowing, wind in a blond girl's hair.
- Techno - an airplane lifting off from a runway. Can see the mirage from heat.

Also, notes seem to have a position in space around me. I don't see them, they're just there. They can move, too.

Last note - when people speak, I don't see images, I see images of the words they're saying on a page like a book. I "read" what I hear. Full sentences scroll on a page, sometimes white, sometimes brown. It's really bad when I see a transliteration, like from Hebrew to English, because I won't see the Hebrew letters. If I have only seen a word in Hebrew, I only see it in Hebrew.

Like, if you say the word cat, I see c-a-t. (not with dashes). "Excitement," I see the word. Or, תפוז, "orange," I see תפוז.

Is this just a vivid imagination or some weird synesthesia going on?

I believe it is though I have never experienced it.

When I hear music, I see colors and patterns of colors. Every song has its own color pattern. And, the more I like a song, the more vivid the colors are. Songs I don't like are usually gray and their colors are washed out... I also see all kinds of scenes when I listen to music.

When people talk to me or when I am reading something, I always see the contents of the message as if it were a movie playing in my head. I do this all the time, ever since I was little. I don't know of any other way t communicate with people. In fact, what I remember mostly are the images my mind had created. That's why I never got maths, because I could never create a mental image of say X+2=5...

I think it has something to do with synesthesia, but it also involves imagination...

When i was little, i have had a dream that repeated 3 times. It was some kind of psychedelic landscape, with lots of colors moving in waves.
Something identical:


I haven't taken LSD lol. Could this have something to do with synesthesia?

PS: i'm a very imaginative person, i like abstract concepts, but i don't see letters or numbers in colors or see music.
Also, sometimes i have some 'synesthetic preferences' (I listen to Aphex Twin and i understood he is synestheic too)

What kinds of scenes do you see? Physical? Abstract?
I get a scene whether or not I like it, and if I'm hyper-sensitive at the time, it's a scene that really bothers me.
I found out last night that the scene doesn't ever match the song - one song elicits visions of an olive tree forest, and another visions of greek columns.



That would be an awesome dream. But, I don't know if it's synesthesia because your mind isn't changing one type of sensory input into another - you're just having an incredibly lucid dream.
Why aren't my dreams like that??? I'm a little jealous.

Lol, i've told about this dream to several people and they told me they're jealous too. But for me it was a little bit frightening I don't know if it was a lucid dream - in which you can control things and people, it was more like a distortion upon space and time (time was flowing very slowly) - very creepy feeling anyway

Do you see it with your eyes(like an hallucination) or with your mind's eyes?

I sometimes see images when listening to music. Usually it is caused by the music, but occasionally I will manufacture images on my own to go with the music. I have one funny one that I sometimes create to go with some classical tunes. I like to imagine that every member of the orchestra is a different variation of me. Some of them will be wearing dresses--a different one for each. Some of them will be wearing formal mens wear. And they will each have a different hair style, and so on. It gets kind of silly, but it amuses me, and harmless humor is good for you.

Sometimes though, the music itself does a good job of making images form in my mind. It's kind of fun.

I also have a frequent tendency, to almost immediately--and without thinking, come up with a tune that relates to a word or phrase that I had just been thinking of. Usually it will be a commercial jingle or a TV show theme tune. My mind just automatically makes the association, and then I am stuck with the tune going around in my brain.

Woah Esther you got some wicked language skills! How do you know Hebrew?

תפוז=orange (the fruit) BTW.... ha I WISH I had synthesia but sadly I'm not Tammet, the aspie guy that counted numbers of pie (yes 3.14...) he did it for couple of hours with no mistakes!! !! If I could do that I'd have let's see.... a private jet, a car for myself.... maybe a couple of bodyguards just to be sure.. you know NTs are unpredictable.

Sounds and music take on a long list of very abstract ideas for me. Often, single notes played alone will be like certain vowels, although I think that's just a crossover from my phonetics training. When I play with the 7 band equalizer on my amp head, the vowel will change based off of which frequencies I have higher or lower. Not sure if this is something that happens just with me, or if this happens to everyone who has training in phonetics/works with lots and lots of languages.

Songs or multiple notes (chords) take on other characteristics. I can still hear the vowels in the individual notes, it's just I get visualizations/thoughts based off of what I'm hearing, and these are often quite abstract and very random. The Bill Evans Trio version of Blue in Green makes me think of someone leaning back in a hard wooden chair, very stereotypical hard wooden chair, no padding or anything. no armrests. Their arms are crossed over their chest, and it's just the part of their back between their shoulder blades touching the chair's back. They are seated farther up in the chair, leaning back, so there is a gap between the back of their chair and their lower back. Their bum is on the first 1/3 of the chair. The person in the chair is male, thin, 20's, wearing sunglasses, smoking, and in a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie.

What I see is even more detailed than that. I could go on. But this is just to give you an idea of how detailed these abstract thoughts/images are.

One of my favorite songs, Portrait of Tracy by Jaco Pastorius, gives me imagery of a bird flying/soaring with completely clear blue skies and the sun high up, yellow/white, bright, but not all the way up in the sky. The weird part is that there is no ground - the bird is flying around in a sky blue void, with the sun there, and nothing else. Just this bird, the wind, the sky, and the sun.

This is just what I get when I listen to the album version. If I listen to him playing it live, or myself or someone else playing it, the visualizations are different. When I'm playing it, as with most things, the visualizations are replaced by my instrument visualizations, finger/hand shapes, things like that - very technical stuff. Listening to a recording of myself playing it yields different visualizations since I'm not actively playing.

What I see is really detailed, in shading and color, like a photograph, or a detailed painting. I don't choose them, either.



I see it in my mind's eye, but to my understanding there are two types of synesthetes - projectors and associators. If this is synesthesia that would be association, right?

@Chummy - I'm minoring in it in college. Trying to get fluent. And yes, I knew that תפוזים are fruit. Do you know hebrew?

The thing I wonder is if it's not just my imagination...but I can't really control it. The images just happen.

I usually see physical scenes. Most of the times, it's scenes involving some of the characters from the stories I'm writing at the time. If I don't focus on them, the scenes are not very well defined. You see, this phenomenon for me starts with seeing just colors - every beat of a song has all sorts of nuances of colors to it. The scenes start morphing based upon these colors. Sometimes, they involve something related to one or two words from the lyrics that I get to visualize (because I always visualize words), but not always. If I focus on the scenes, they get to be very clear and I can start an entire narrative running in my head. The scenes usually are centered around the emotions induced by the song. They can also be landscapes or actions inspired by the beat of the song.

Oh, it happens to me too. I think it has to do with the imagination. Maybe you're more right-brained (are you left handed or have some artistic talents?) Imagination is great (maybe more interesting than synesthesia), you should be proud

It is definitely a form of synesthesia and there's nothing "wrong" with it! I find synesthesia and all of its varied forms fascinating. I've known people who see colors when they hear music, or associate shapes with colors. Because it involves a "mixing" of senses, a breaking down of the brain barriers between senses, it has many, many forms.

My own form is "tasting" words; I associate particular foods with different words. Almost every word has a "food" associated with it, some words even have a particular texture. I've had this ever since I can remember, well before I ever knew that it was actually a condition that had a specific medical name. Once I found that out, I felt a bit less "crazy", lol.

I tend to associate a lot of things too - i remembered that sometimes i have a strange sensation like i perceive my emotions (most of the times when i have anxiety attacks) like a huge sphere inside me that is growing in size. When i was little i also had a very nightmarish dream with geometrical figures like they had personalities and were breathing like humans and i woke up at night crying and screaming - but doctors said i had pavor nocturnus. Anyway i'm still obsessed about geometrical figures and i tend to think in pictures. Never thought about of having synesthesia (i don't see music or something like that) but still think it has to do with a rich imagination Sorry for my english

That's interesting. I'm mixed-handed (can write better with my right, but do everything else equally with my left, and write pretty well with my left).
I think it's a form of both. The images I see in the songs don't change even if I don't listen for 8 years. But, it's often connected to the title.
If I don't know the title, then the song either has a color, or a very random image.

[quote"westernwild"]It is definitely a form of synesthesia and there's nothing "wrong" with it! I find synesthesia and all of its varied forms fascinating. I've known people who see colors when they hear music, or associate shapes with colors. Because it involves a "mixing" of senses, a breaking down of the brain barriers between senses, it has many, many forms.

My own form is "tasting" words; I associate particular foods with different words. Almost every word has a "food" associated with it, some words even have a particular texture. I've had this ever since I can remember, well before I ever knew that it was actually a condition that had a specific medical name. Once I found that out, I felt a bit less "crazy", lol.[/quote]

Thanks for your encouragement. It's weird. One week I find out I have Asperger's, and the next, that I have synesthesia. It's discovery year, I guess.