I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

I'm somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can't see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it's all very vague and shadowy.

Do you guys sometimes also get the weird feeling of: "this is my body, this is planet earth, this is my flat and I live here." Sometimes that happens. And when that happens, I usually think about things like how the universe came to be the big bang, the laws of physics fighting each other until settling on a seady state. Then the Earth is created, millions of years of evolution go by and here you are, sitting on the toilet. The entire chain of thought only lasts for about five seconds and then you're again stuck with the feeling of "I am back here on planet Earth". Do you guys also get that sometimes?

I play DND with a "theatre of the mind" battle system (no map or miniatures, we just remember where we are) with a a dude who's a 5 and I have no idea how he does it.

Most days I'm about a 3, sometimes it's more like 4. If I'm reading a book or doing something like that, where I'm really focusing on the visualization, I can get to 2. The only time I ever get to 1 is when I'm laying in bed at night about to fall asleep.

I have real trouble sleeping sometimes, and one of the things I do to help is put on instrumental music (lately, a lot of jazz sax), and then pick some random scenario, like:

"if I could be king of the world what policy changes would I make?"

Or "if I ever get to have kids, what kind of things would I most want to teach them?"

Or "Let's design the perfect floorplan for my dream home"

And as I begin to drift off, but while still consciously aware, I can see things in stunning detail, but it's always like they're semi transparent. That's not a great example, because there's no backdrop, but it's the best I've got.

This reminded me of a sort of similar topic, and curiously enough it's about reading, and might provide some insight into your question.

Some years ago, I happened on a thread in which the OP asked people whose voice they "heard" when they read.

I couldn't even make sense of that question. The only time I "hear" voices when I read is when a character speaks. The rest of the time, I not only don't "hear" the words - I'm not even really aware of them. My eyes follow the lines while my brain instantly translates the words I'm seeing into images and concepts and the like. And yes - it's like a movie playing out inside my brain, and yes, I'm a #1 on this chart.

But apparently there's a not insignificant number of people who "hear" a book inside their heads just as if someone else was reading it out loud. Instead of visualizing things, they remain focused only on the words - the representations - and somehow glean from them alone the necessary details.

I wouldn't be surprised if those people are also generally #5 or thereabouts on this chart, and again what it is is that their brains don't directly envision things but instead rely on descriptive representations.

I don't get how it works either, but self-evidently it does.