Do you guys sometimes also get the weird feeling of: "this is my body, this is planet earth, this is my flat and I live here." Sometimes that happens. And when that happens, I usually think about things like how the universe came to be the big bang, the laws of physics fighting each other until settling on a seady state. Then the Earth is created, millions of years of evolution go by and here you are, sitting on the toilet. The entire chain of thought only lasts for about five seconds and then you're again stuck with the feeling of "I am back here on planet Earth". Do you guys also get that sometimes?

I’m a 5, yet I can have extremely vivid dreams that are exactly like I am in that world. I can perfectly picture peoples faces from the past too while dreaming. So the ability is in there somewhere. 🤷‍♂️

Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.

being a 1 with ADHD is crazy, like I can be in the middle of a class and zone out and start visualising myself walking around the campus in incredible detail, or FPV droning inside a friend's house, or really anything I can think of, although that said it takes a fair bit of effort to keep it going beyond a certain amount of time.

For individual objects it is difficult to impossible for me to create the exact image.

For directions however, I can do a visual "fly" over the roads which I believe I should be going down, to make sure I'm going the right place. The roads are clear images, but not to the same effect of watching a video of someone driving along said roads.

I'm coming to think there is a lot more nuance to this than the 5 images let on.

This one is a cluster fuck for me... I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.

Don't really know how that fits in.

I play DND with a "theatre of the mind" battle system (no map or miniatures, we just remember where we are) with a a dude who's a 5 and I have no idea how he does it.

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

Most days I'm about a 3, sometimes it's more like 4. If I'm reading a book or doing something like that, where I'm really focusing on the visualization, I can get to 2. The only time I ever get to 1 is when I'm laying in bed at night about to fall asleep.

I have real trouble sleeping sometimes, and one of the things I do to help is put on instrumental music (lately, a lot of jazz sax), and then pick some random scenario, like:

"if I could be king of the world what policy changes would I make?"

Or "if I ever get to have kids, what kind of things would I most want to teach them?"

Or "Let's design the perfect floorplan for my dream home"

And as I begin to drift off, but while still consciously aware, I can see things in stunning detail, but it's always like they're semi transparent. That's not a great example, because there's no backdrop, but it's the best I've got.

I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can't see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it's all very vague and shadowy.