I have aphantasia as well but I do actually have something sort of like a memory palace.. kinda. It should be completely useless when I’m awake, but isn’t. I have a dream town, and every place I’ve dreamed about more than three times in the last ~20 years is there in a surprisingly consistent and exceptionally vivid way, like logging into a mmorpg, but spawning in random places. If not for it being easily recognizable as “my town”, I’d struggle to tell it from waking reality because that’s the only other time I experience “sight”. It’s genuinely unsettling sometimes, when my brain makes a new place, to not know if I was dreaming. Maybe that’s why I revisit places until they feel comfortable and familiar and get incorporated into the town.

I say it isn’t completely useless because I use spacial memory to “go places” when awake. I can’t see it, but I know what’s there if I go there, the same way I can mentally count the windows, and know what’s around them, in my house without visually touring the house; I think about where I go to open windows on a nice day, and count the stops.

I can’t put things into the town purposely. Locations or objects, unfortunately. Everything has to already be there if I want to make use of it. But if I can find a useful thing on my spacial tour, I can make note of where I found it, or move it to somewhere more useful. Like the finding the windows exercise, but, to continue your example, I happen to recall that next to window 3 is a Christmas cactus with pink heart-shaped flower buds, and I choose to ”move it” it to the 7th window of my tour. (And yes, if I make note that I’ve moved something, it does stay there when I dream, so that’s really neat)

Genuinely not that useful for things people probably normally use a memory palace sort of thing for, like short-term memories, (finding useful objects is difficult, and sometimes requires a lot of in-dream exploring, which takes actual time) but somewhat useful for certain long-term things, like numbers or recipes. And as a bonus, when I forget something, I’ll often stumble across it in my town and be reminded. Like the recipe for my mom’s cheesecake is the literal ingredients just sitting on the counter in the pocket floor she lives in (she’s a nightmare I had often enough to join the town’s residents, but I shoved her in an impossible floor so I can avoid her). I put that recipe there because I like to modify it, and I often forget what the base recipe is. It’s not written down in the normal sense because I’ll lose it, but it’s simple enough for a representation like that to be easy to hold onto.

But I’ve had similar frustrating experiences with people telling me to visualize things for whatever reason. Like nope, my internal computer is GUI-free. Text output only, with a screen reader. Not even multiple voices, which I hear is a thing most people can do, just the one default reader voice.

On the subject of not being able to visualize people, if there’s someone you haven’t seen in a long time, do you falsely match other people up with the description? For example, my mom died when I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now. It’s been so long that I genuinely don’t remember what she looks like unless I’m looking at a photo. But I know her general description, and when I see other women who fit the description I -feel- that they look just like her even though they usually don’t, actually.