Comment by tananan

I want to make a distinction: Just because the mind’s eye and the eye proper are different domains in some sense, it doesn’t mean that mental images cannot have an intensity/consistency to them that can reach or sure-enough, overpower the physical sense data.

Mostly I’m in the same boat at you: I have some visualization ability but I can’t just superimpose such mental images over my vision, without vision completely dominating. The mental object is so fidgety, dim and fleeting that the input from the eye completely washes it out.

But that seems to me to be a matter of the degree to which my mental images are usually pronounced.

In dreams and those weird hypnagogic intervals, I’ve had very vivid mental imagery, that makes me understand the mind is at least in principle capable of presenting mental objects of an intensity that matches sense impressions.

Now let’s say someone’s faculty of visualization is developed to the degree that their intentional mental imagery has an intensity and consistency comparable to that of regular vision.

I don’t see why they couldn’t, with the appropriate effort, “mix” the two in such a way that they are superimposed without any side dominating the other.