It sounds like you might be aphantasic and were not aware of it for long time.

I remember when I first realised people had real pictures, in my 20s. I had a friend whose technique for studying involved putting notes on his wall. He claimed he had photographic memory, and could walk over to his wall in his mind and read any piece of paper on it.

We had a long conversation after that exploring each other's experiences. I cannot picture anything while awake (only sometimes when asleep or in deep meditation). He was aware that photographic memory was unusually good, but assumed that everyone had at least some visual memory/imagination.

I also remember the first time I "saw" the difference too. I was waking up from a dream, once of only 2 dreams I remembered strongly after waking up.

I was in a scene like in an action movie, running away from someone in a tall office building. I run up some stairs, burst into a room, and spot an open window across the room, with a big bunch of blue balloons outside tied together and floating up.

I dash across the room and jump out the window, grabbing onto the string under the balloons. As I float up, I start to swing around, bback towards the building. I see the shiny windows, but just before I turn far enough to see the balloons or myself in the reflection, I fade into awakeness. Up to this point everything had looked just like real life, but as soon as I woke up, I could not imagine the imaagery any more.

Since then, on a couple of occasions when I'm really tired, I'll catch myself transitioning to sleep, because after the lights are out, I'll start fading into picturing myself in a random location, but as soon as I notice it and try to interact with the world, I fade out to black again.

So I have had the experience of being able to "see" things in my head (maybe a dozen times in my life while sleeping, two of which I remember vividly, and once while doing an extended meditation session, and once during a hypnosis lesson on induction). And I can contrast those specific visual experiences with the blackness I get when I close my eyes any other time.

Have you tried this experiment yourself, or on others to see how much detail they visually imagine? [0] In my experience, most people report somewhere between a 2 or a 3. I tend to ask people to close their eyes and imagine this scene, then read out panel 4 verbatim. "A woman sits at a table. She is resting her chin upon her hands. Apples sit on the table to the right of her. A pineapple to her left.". I give them 30 seconds to notice their imagination then show them the 4 panels and ask which is closest to their imagination. The thing that's most interesting is not the number that they say, but that a significant proportion of people point out the differences from what they imagined, unprompted. Like "I saw her with shorter hair", or "I saw green apples", or "in my head, she was a brunette". Those are not things I would even think of if you read out that description to me.

[0] <https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what...>