[crimsonalucard]

The picture we conjure up in our mind is also not the most detailed picture. It's not exact. It's a very blurry image but not in the same sense that an image is made blurry through a camera lens. It's also not an image, but a 3D model and it usually sits in some sort of relevant but made up setting.

For example. If I was told to imagine a barn, the first image to pop up is the barn. For no apparent reason, the barn is red.

How many windows does the barn have? No clue, didn't even realize that the barn had some windows. I can then sort of materialize the windows into a concrete amount (two for example). But do note that before I thought about the windows the 3D model of the barn existed in a state that can only be conjured by the imagination. The barn literally had an unknown amount of windows, not no windows or some windows, but I just wasn't thinking about the windows. The other weird part of this is that we don't consciously realize that the model is incomplete, yet if we took this incomplete model of the barn and put it in the real world we can then instantly identify this inconsistency and weirdness.

Also for no apparent reason the barn is sitting on a grass field and it's dusk.

If you can dream, the image is exactly the same as your dream. Blurry three dimensional objects that can materialize in greater detail as you focus.

[Nition]

This fits way more with my experience than the other comments so far. And as you say, the indistinct form of imagined things is the same in dreams.

There are some differences I can think of with my dreams. One is that of course it really does feel like you're there in a dream. When I imagine something while awake, it's more like a little model surrounded by nothingness in my head.

Another is that in dreams things are often strange, proportions all wrong, just general weirdness. Imagining while awake, you have control over the form.

There are people in this thread saying that they can essentially replace their reality with imagination while awake, "projecting" the scene in front of them. I can't do that, but I can imagine a scene well enough to get by. Maybe there's not so much Normal vs. Aphantasia at all, but a whole spectrum between the two extremes.

[anthony_romeo]

This describes my minds eye perfectly. For me it’s kinda like seeing only at the point of focus without any peripheral vision. My minds eye darts around picking up details as I imagine them.

[pbhjpbhj]

I imagine like this, it always seemed to fit well with Bertrand Russel's conceptualisation of the "table" in his beginners treatise on philosophy ("Problems of Philosophy"). The barn in my mind is the concept of barn, it's not really solidified in to an image-able object.

In dreams I enjoy the contradictory nature of things/people, like someone in the dream is themselves fully and also someone else; or a barn say is painted red and made of wood whilst simultaneously being entirely constructed of windows, and the windows can't be looked out of ...

[vcavallo]

yes, this. “an unknown amount of windows”. i’d even say an “unknown unknown amount of windows” :)

[Nition]

Yeah, it's a bit like how your mind fills in the blanks for the blind spot in your vision where the optic nerve is. You don't even think about the fact that the data is missing until you go looking for something in that spot.