I was reading an essay about A Clockwork Orange yesterday, and found myself thinking about the fact that I've never read the book or seen the movie. If I were to do either, I decided, I'd definitely read the book first to figure out if I could handle watching it, since I'd heard that it was fairly brutal. Reading something like that is much easier for me.

It wasn't until I was out of college that I figured out that there are people who experience reading in a very different way than I do. In fact, I only figured it out due to the hoopla surrounding the Harry Potter books. What did the proponents of the books mean when they said the books had kid use their imaginations, I wondered. The author did the imagining, obviously, so how could reading something use imagination? Not long after this I learned something startling: there are people, a lot of them even, who see things while they read. Apparently for them it's movie-like, and the scene unfolds for them in their mind's eye.

Weird! I don't "see" anything when I read. Instead, I hear it, as if you were telling me something and I was listening to you. What's probably odder is I don't see anything when I write either.  Once in a while I'll get a quick mental image of something, but it's more like a postcard than a movie clip. This makes comments like "I love your story! I could imagine it happening exactly like a film!" very strange to me, since I don't and it's things I've written! On the other hand, knowing that some people see what they read in retrospect makes the complaints in my creative writing class that some of us didn't give good enough descriptions of our characters slightly less silly. Since I don't see the characters myself, I don't really care what they look like, but I suppose if you could, you might want a clear picture.

It's not just writing. I have vivid dreams, and those are cinematic, but most of my thoughts are word-based rather than having associated mental pictures with them. I think many of my daydreams are too.  I don't seem to do a lot of picturing of anything with my eyes open, to be honest.  It must be fascinating to imagine things vividly as you read, but it seems like it would be distracting too. Even though I understand more about how the other half sees things, though, I'm not really jealous. Hearing a story is nice as well.