I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.

My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.

It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.

One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.

After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.

It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.

I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.

Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!

I'm also aphantasic and dream normally.

I have some intermittent ability to lucid dream. I have noticed that if I am acting as a "passenger", the imagery is vivid and I will be able to recall everything. Sometimes something in the dream will prompt me to think. It might be entering a phone number, or reading text. As soon as I engage the process of thinking, the imagery goes away. Long lucid dreams for me rely on me being able to remain in the passenger seat.

In my waking life I consider my aphantasia similarly - I can imagine things and get the briefest of a "snapshot" of an image, but any attempt to hold onto it means it vanishes - I don't know how that's related but I suspect that it is.

I know this is different to how I am wired for sound, because I have inner music, inner voices, etc. I can replay music at will, change voices, investigate and modify them, all with perfect quality of audio recall. Earworms can be really annoying ;)

I'm also aphantasic and dream normally. The only time I've been "awake" and been able to visualize anything was the few times when I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and when I closed my eyes I was able to see a room in vivid detail but everything was in grayscale. This has happened multiple times and is probably more connected to being in sort of a "between-state" of waking and sleeping than the ability to actually visualize with my imagination.

I have no clue if I'm aphantasic (I genuinely have trouble feeling like anyone describes anything resembling my experience in conversations like this), but I had many years of lucid dreaming from being prescribed medication for my insomnia as a kid. It started out being pretty much every night, and then slowly became less frequent until nowadays it's maybe once every month or so.

"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.