waht said:
Yes indeed, I experienced weird things, and sometimes revelations.
It might be good for you to describe all this in a journal. Write a history of it, as it were.
Dyslexia is associated with a learning disability, which I have in subjects like humanities, and English. I actually had to take English composition in college six times to pass. Other humanity courses I retook two to three times. While in high school, I begged them to put me in a differential equation class. Such disparity between the extremes negatively impacted me in school though. That is the price I have to pay now for having these abilities.
In some cases unwanted deficits allow for, and lead to, the development of unusual strengths elsewhere. The first is not a "price paid" for the second, though. The second isn't a guaranteed consequence of the first: not all autistic people become savants, for example (In fact only a small percentage do).
The "ability", too, may not be a compensatory building of "muscle" at all but another form of deficit that happens, coincidently, to be of use. Richard Cytowic, who studies synaethesia, believes it to be a malfunction which causes certain information to become conscious prematurely; before it has been completely processed. People who have this condition, though, find it to be extremely useful and rely on it to the degree they are nervous that his scrutiny might lead to the pronouncement that it is not "real".
I mention synaethesia deliberately because I think there's a chance the kind of visualization you experience is related. Same in Tesla's case. For you, instead of sound being manifested as forms and colors in the visual field, thought, itself, gets manifested. I am speculating there, however.
Something else is also weird. I was never good at writing. I always wrote broken up sentences, and very incoherently at that. But when I took English the sixth time, I had to write the torturous 12 page research paper again. When I wrote it, I received an A-, but my writing style improved exponentially over night. Such a quantum leap has inspired me to write a book even, which I began but stopped subsequently due time constraints. I'm considering to resume writing again.
Once in a while I read a description of someone crossing a threshold to suddenly become adept at something that previously eluded them. This is a pretty fascinating phenomenon which probably hasn't been studied, per se. I suggest you write this story down as well.
I don't know which precedes the other, both are certainly plausible. It is definitely not involuntary, but rather it became a habit as "daydream drifts" are quite soothing. If I become bored for a second, I will find myself daydreaming again, or hallucinating.
I think it's extremely common for people's thoughts to drift when bored. The unusual thing in your case is how the thoughts manifest so visually to you. The process of imagining is somehow presented to your consciousness as having a certain fraction of reality, of being stimulated by signals from the outside world when they aren't. The fact it's transparent suggests it's only occurring in one side of the visual field. Not in one eye or the other, but in one half of each eye, either the right or left half, which is how the visual field is divided. A proper kind of test would be able to determine which side of the visual field is involved and the hemisphere governing that side would be the hemisphere where the main cause is no doubt located. Since you are dyslexic, I would bet on the left hemisphere. However, a person can have bilateral problems, too, of course.
I actually had EEG done while being in either kindergarten or the first grade. That's when they diagnosed me as having some level of dyslexia. A psych evaluation was requested on behalf of the school as teachers noted my peculiar behavior, or my learning disability. In either case, the psychiatrist conclusion was I would turn out ok. Fast forward today, it would be interesting in taking EEG and other tests just out of curiosity. A weird spike here and there would definitely show up on the graph.
Surface EEG's are only sensitive to a certain depth. An EEG showing no epileptiform discharges does not rule them out. Finding some, though, automatically rules them in. It would be interesting, anyway, just to see if anything unusual showed up, as would the other scans.
Although your diagnosis is dyslexia I'm sure there's more to it, and that dyslexia is one symptom of something more, just because that seems to be the way these things occur. A woman I know here is diagnosed as dyslexic, but she also has a rare case of female colorblindness. A guy I know here who's been diagnosed as dyslexic has also been told he is probably "autistic" as well (they probably meant he had features of Asperger's, he's clearly not autistic.) There are a lot of people who don't fit squarely into a well defined diagnosis, but who will be told they do for legal and medical purposes.
Tesla's visualization abilities weren't concommitant with dyslexia at all, but with severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. This functioned alternately as a strength and a weakness. It was a strength when it drove him to be meticulous, but a weakness when he was compelled to divert time and energy into satisfying unimportant conditions to proceed. He would not allow himself to eat, for example, until he had calculated the volume of the soup bowl in front of him.
