School Colours

Aphantasia is the difference between a mind with sight and one that can’t visualize the very world we live in, not in colour and not in memory. It’s not a disease, nor is it a disorder, but to Lexie Dunning, it’s nothing short of a haunting, and she aims to dispel it.

“Lexie, I need help,” Quinn confessed tearfully.

Lexie is an Academic Success Coach at the University and has never had a problem visualizing images vividly and in full technicolour glory. She’s taken it for granted, she realizes, as Quinn begins pouring out her heart.

Lexie’s dreams alone are peppered with the mental and visual imagery that photographers and artists immerse themselves in at any time of the day. As she listens to Quinn describe how she must rely on words alone to conjure up any pictures in her mind, she is perplexed.

“I thought I’d be able to breeze through this program because I think in words!” The panic and confusion in Quinn’s voice are audible. “But I’m starting to get really frustrated with the writing I have to do, and I can’t tell my teachers or my parents that I don’t have what it takes.”

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions just yet,” Lexie says. She hands Quinn some tissues across her desk and pulls up Quinn’s academic file. Quinn’s GPA is 3.3. Solid. Lexie’s intuition tells her that on the one hand, someone with aphantasia could be an exceptional writer. To be forced to think in words alone to make things come alive on the page is either a gift that begs to be cultivated or a failure of the brain to serve its human host properly.

“It’s not like I can miss what I never had,” Quinn says sadly. “I just don’t know why school got so hard, so fast here.”

Lexie’s experience comes to the rescue and tells her the same thing she’s been seeing with student after student since she’d started work in the Learning Commons.

“Quinn, high school forces you to rely so much on memorization, guided questions and fill‑in‑the‑blanks that you never really developed a need to think outside the box.”

While Lexie wants to tell Quinn she can, in fact, help her, she needs to know more about aphantasia. But her gut instinct already is to change it for Quinn altogether. She’s enjoyed nothing short of an imagination streaked with rainbows, colour palettes and Sherwin-Williams paint samples.

“If you say ‘apple’, I know what an apple is,” Quinn continues. “But I can’t see it in my head.” She’s speaking factually now.

“Yet you can identify colours when you see them?”

“Yes. I can see colours, but when I close my eyes, I draw a blank.”

Lexie’s heart begins to break a little as she listens.

Jumping to conclusions herself, Lexie sees the inside of Quinn’s mind as lightless. It leaves her wanting for, well, words. Her own imagination begins running away with her. Is black a colour or not?

“Is it, um, dark? In your mind, that is?” Lexie feels as though she’s probing into Quinn’s brain with an electrode.

“No. It’s just, nothing.”

In Lexie’s vulnerability, she remembers the Mark Rothko paintings she studied in college.

“Have you tried looking at art?” she asks.

The way Rothko layered those rectangular bands of colour was an experience in both bliss and torment for Lexie. One had made her see herself walking off the first layer of bleached sand and swimming fearlessly into a second stack of happy water. Her gaze was fixed on the top tier. It held for her a setting sun that never really descended behind anything and so kept her calm. She still remembered the peaceful state of colour therapy it had produced in her. She pulled up a window on the laptop of the painting for Quinn to look at.

“When I think of it,” Lexie began, “I close my eyes, and it’s like I’m there all over again, reliving the moment through the very colours he used.”

“Hmm, it’s a different sort of painting altogether. The way you describe it, though, it’s like it was a real place you visited and lived in. That helps me remember what colours can mean,” Quinn said.

“That’s great!” Lexie exclaimed. This was definitely going in the right direction, and she had to make a conscious effort to curb her enthusiasm. “Let’s try another one,” she suggested.

“Sure, I’m game,” Quinn grinned. Lexie was beginning to feel the strength of her desire exerting itself to bring life to her student’s thinking. A mind’s eye, an imagination and sparks flying to life. It felt as though she was working a miracle. Was it possible for an impossibility such as this? It would be amazing to be a part of Quinn’s journey towards it.

Was it mystery or magic? Lexie wondered. Mark Rothko definitely had a gift woven into his simple method, and it manifested for people willing to look long enough. For someone who could only read her world, her memories and even her emotions in words, Quinn needed some illustrations. Lexie herself felt she could provide them.

“Are you willing to go on a different journey with this one? It was a bit of a trip for me, but maybe my feelings can awaken something in you if you’re willing to look with me. Maybe you’ll be able to see through me, so to speak.”

“Well, okay.” Quinn seemed a bit nervous and not without good reason because it seemed to be working.

“Fine. I’ll tell you what I saw. You just keep looking and listening.”

“Let me be your guide,” Lexie added. She pulled up the second painting on the laptop and put it in full-screen mode.

Quinn never felt more blind and dependent than at that moment. A glimpse of something resembling imagery was exhilarating, but it was opening up a world she had never known before. How would her life change from this moment on? Lexie had become the seeing-eye dog that she trusted to protect her through the real waters of real life that she could actually see. How would her thoughts change on the inside? Would her life change too?

The next painting had five layers that seemed innocent enough. Lexie could recall feeling that she’d had such a positive experience the first time; she would embark on this one without a care in the world. She’d felt no fear. She’d started “climbing” the layers haplessly, like a baby conquering stairs on her hands and knees. Then finally the last step that brought her up on the platform of the painting, the fourth layer of colour. The expanse was vast and open, and its floor was smooth, if not slippery. She was standing on it. She’d scaled her way up to it and now surveyed her surroundings.

There was no turning back.

With a walk ahead of her to get to the final layer, she began to feel trepidation. Hadn’t those daubs of paint looked like trees? They hadn’t seemed ominous when she was only peering at them over the edge of the previous stack. Now she’d arrived, and she was aware of how alone she was in the brush‑stroked shades of blue. How could it become, when watered down, such a lonely path that led not to trees anymore, but dark smokestacks? And if there were smokestacks, there must be people. Maybe bad people. She stood in the center and started to feel scared. The sides of this level looked as if there were drop‑offs. It wasn’t that she feared falling off so much as she did others crawling up from somewhere beneath them. And just like that, she’d become terrorized, locked in place, needing to look away. Her heart continued pounding, and her hands felt shaky. She was sweaty, and in her mind, she’d stayed there, never having turned around or leaving the way she’d come.

After she finished retelling the scene, she turned to a wide‑eyed Quinn. She’d been looking back and forth from the painting to Lexie like a pair of eyes blinking involuntarily.

“Lexie, are you okay?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m fine!” Lexie exclaimed. “It was only scary at the time, and for a little while afterwards,” she continued, laughing.

“How about you? Do you think you’ll remember the colour blue, and red, and the sharpness of the green that I hoisted myself off of to get myself into that predicament?” She smiled at the student.

“I think I’ll never forget it, but I may be able to counteract it with the blue of the ocean you swam in,” Quinn said a little uneasily.

Lexie too, worried that she had passed on the wrong emotions to Quinn.

She thought for a moment, then said, “Quinn, let me tell you, it’s my pleasure to have freaked myself out for you to see those colours...in...a whole different light, shall we say?”

She secretly hoped that Quinn would soon shake off the initial jolt, remembering only what she needed and wanted.

“I guess you could call it mind games,” Quinn suddenly and confidently said, as though she’d had a revelation. Her smile set Lexie’s worries to flight.

“Well, it’s not magic, you can rest assured,” Lexie said. “I guess it’s just me.”

“God uses everything for good, so not only am I no longer alone and terrified in that painting, but you’ve received colours you can attach significance to. That’s really all I was trying to help you do.”

“Can we keep going?” Quinn asked with a note of hope in her voice that Lexie was beginning to get used to, and like a lot.

Lexie replied without hesitation. “You bet we can! But maybe we can wrap this session up for today, and I can hunt for more paintings, even black and whites that struck chords in me.”

“And what do you think about visiting some museums? Don’t even get me started on nature walks. They’ll have to send out a search party!”

“Oh, Lexie, that sounds fantastic! We can have lunch outside. My treat. Or what about a picnic? Can we take some pictures of our own?”

“We can absolutely do all of those things!” Now Lexie was excited too.

“I can’t wait to see how this affects your learning,” Lexie added. Her hopes for Quinn were beginning to bubble up. She desperately wanted her sight restored in the most sacred place—her mind, her thoughts, her imagination, but couldn’t say it out loud. What she didn’t realize was that she was already creating new memories for Quinn to draw on. The real miracle would be in making them stick, or at least overlap with images that lived there long term. That was what Lexie felt would be the work. With the weekend ahead, she’d have time for extra research and to reflect.

Waking up to an October sky on a sunny Saturday morning packed as much of a punch as a first cup of strong coffee. Lexie opened her laptop and started a casual search of aphantasia. She would have to ask Quinn if she’d ever been tested. Quinn had already provided the diagnosis, but Lexie herself might be able to determine where she was on her visual imagination spectrum. She continued with a simpler Google image search of aphantasia and began scrolling.

Faces began to pop up, and one caught her eye. The caption read: “Famous American magician, comedian and author Penn Jillette.” Penn had a partner—Teller—Raymond Joseph, that is, but his official documents listed his legal name as Teller.

“Fame and fortune have a name all their own,” Lexie thought, and it was no understatement. This duo was listed with the most iconic magicians in history.

Lexie couldn’t help wondering, “How am I only now learning about these guys?” While she wasn’t exactly an avid follower, she did have a soft spot for David Blaine and his magic. She watched a couple of short video documentaries. They, like David Blaine, pushed boundaries, but nothing was said about Jillette’s aphantasia.

With the next and last video of Penn talking about himself, Lexie made a sad discovery. Penn Jillette is an atheist. And an outspoken one at that.

It was definitely time for a walk. This was beginning to weigh her down, and what she needed for Quinn’s sake was to fill her cup, not deplete it.

Once outdoors and on the move, Lexie began to pray. She wanted God to restore Quinn’s sight, and that’s what Jesus had done for people. In Lexie’s heart, there was no difference.

“Father, thank You that Quinn has physical sight,” she gushed. It could be a lot worse. If someone could achieve all the success that Penn Jillette had and still live without the ability to form images in his mind, there wasn’t anything holding Quinn back, either.

Lexie decided to take her shoes off and walk on the cool grass. She touched tree trunks and crumpled dry, autumn-splattered handfuls of leaves in her hands. She snapped pictures of the deepened blue sky. She marvelled at how high the trees rose to it and how beautiful their stark branches stood against it. The sun filtered through them without hindrances, and its aura was larger and absolutely luminescent. It practically rang out with a resplendent hum of light.

And so did Lexie as she made her way home.

Lexie and Quinn continued to work together until one day, Quinn said something that made Lexie fiercely protective of her student’s growth. They were walking by the Lake’s edge, flicking cold November water in each other’s faces.

“Lexie, now that I feel more about the things I’m supposed to see in my mind, I feel like it might be broken.”

“Then you have to start applying the things we’ve seen and shared,” Lexie answered. “Your mind is absolutely NOT broken, but you have to overcome the fear of writing now.”

“That might take some magic,” Quinn joked nervously.

“No,” Lexie laughed. “That will take work. It’s not a new hurdle. Think of it as an extension of our shared experiences.”

Lexie picked up a stick from the ground and started drawing lines in the sand. She handed the stick to Quinn.

“One sentence,” she said. “Start with just one sentence. Even if it’s ugly and messy and you’re embarrassed that it came from you, write it down. You can only fix it if you’ve written it first.”

Lexie was home on Sunday afternoon. She started scrolling through sermons and landed on one of her favourite preachers, Pastor Max Lucado. He was preaching on the book of Revelation. Lexie’s mind and heart were fully tuned in. The majestic Throne Room seemed so otherworldly, and the deeply dramatic and awe‑inspiring Lamb and the scroll. The chaos of the Four Horsemen was so vivid to her that she could almost feel the thundering of their hooves beneath her. As she bowed her head in prayer, she once again asked God to heal Quinn’s aphantasia.

“Tell her to read this book,” she heard Him speak to her heart. Lexie remembered the blessing that was promised to those who read it. She reached for her Bible and found the passage:

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”

If Quinn wanted to work a bit of magic of her own, God might give her the means to do it. If words were what she lived with in her mind, what divine magic would the Living Word Himself do in there? And not just in her mind, but in her heart, where all thoughts begin. The ones worth remembering, that is.