Comment by svachalek

I'm really not sure, I identify with people on all sides of this in different ways. If I try to picture an apple, I get something - vague, fleeting, not in my actual field of view - that tells me something what it feels like to look at an apple. It's not a vivid image, but it's not nothing.

But this contrasts sharply to music for example, most of the time if I think about a song I can "hear" it; not like I'm actually hearing it, I hear actual reality around me. But the fidelity of the song can be quite sharp, I can hear all the little details as if I actually had it playing.

But then again people talk about having trouble manipulating images in their mind to solve spatial puzzles and the like, and that's no issue for me; I'm quite good at those. And on the other hand, dreaming for me is not like watching a movie. Sometimes there is rough imagery, like what I get when I try to picture an apple, but mostly they're purely abstract: thoughts, words, ideas, not video.

I suspect it all comes down to quirks of how consciousness works for different people, and how we communicate about them, rather than being a hard binary thing you have or don't have.