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by Jtsummers 1538 days ago
> I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.

This gets back a bit to what alar44 was saying:

>> I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination.

Having a vivid imagination is not the same as hallucinating. There is no confusion in my mind between what is real and what is imagined (visual or auditory imaginations, I can also imagine smell and taste, but to a much lesser extent). I don't "see" my mental images through my eyes, in the sense that if I want to imagine what a chair would look like in the corner of my loft, I see the real scene (loft without the chair) and imagine (in my mind) a separate scene, the same (to the accuracy of the imagination) but with the chair.

But it very much is an image in my head. It's not an abstract sense of what it would be like to have the chair there, it is the same as recalling a scene from the past to me. But deliberately altered, rather than accidentally altered based on faulty memory. In the same way, I can recall the visual image of pages I have read (this ability has declined with age) and read the words off that recalled image.

1 comments

I wouldn't know what having a vivid imagination is like; hell, I don't exactly even know what a hallucination is like, so I would never try to claim that they must be the same.

I get more of a picture than `chousuke, but it's certainly not a scene or an image. The best way I can think of describing it is a very low-res/blurry/faded image. Like I sorta can picture my mom's hairstyle and sorta put it on top of a face and pull in a few other details from specific memories here and there. But things like color of eyes, or size of certain facial features vs other? No way.

Right. This is what people are talking about when they say they can imagine how someone looks.