[vidarh]

It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense.

I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like.

And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical.

And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream.

It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real.

But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike.

And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.