Is my visual imagination weird compared to yours?
I read a book last year with techniques for overcoming insomnia. One of the exercises was to imagine ten stars shining in the night sky, each representing a worry, and then work through them one-by-one (I forget the details). Anyway, after five decades of existence, I learned something new: I cannot hold a picture of ten stars shining in the night sky in my imagination. In fact, I cannot hold any static image in my imagination. As soon as I try to look at any detail at all, look at one star, say, the image falls apart and all I'm left with is blackness. And I cannot stop myself from trying to look at the details.
The same goes for capturing anything I'm looking at. I can close my eyes now and briefly hold an image of the computer screen in front of me in my mind, but as soon as I try to "look" at any detail, the image disappears to blackness.
Weirdly (I think), what I can do is hold a moving image in my head, spinning it around and looking at it from different angles, resolving more details as I zoom in, becoming more vague as I zoom out, but always staying in motion. For example, I can hold a car engine (ICE) in my head and zoom in and watch individual parts operating and I continue to fly around them, but if I zoom out again it becomes little more than a vague engine block, so the total amount of detail at any zoom level is quite limited. I think this might be because I'm really just creating a series of still images and continuously replacing them as they quickly fade to blackness. I cannot replace one image with another just like it, as I'm always switching perspectives to whatever detail my mind is tracking next.
Does anyone else experience this strange, always-in-motion kind of visual imagination? I'm guessing it's an autistic thing. I kind of like it, but it hasn't helped with my insomnia.
