>well where is your mental imagery? In my mind.

>can you not do it with your eyes open? I can. I just don't actually, physically see it in front of me.

I can imagine a red apple, and I can imagine it's shape and color and the spots on its skin and I can even mentally feel it, smooth or bruised, I can even taste it, but just in my mind.

What is the difference between tasting an apple in your mind and remembering what an apple tastes like?

I think I have the same kind of garden variety visualization experience that you have. There is bound to be a spectrum where some people's mental imagery is virtually non-existent on one end, and it's very lucid and persistent on the other. The people who come out of the woodworks online claiming they have a mental heads-up display, like AR superimposed on their vision, make me raise an eyebrow. I'd be more inclined to believe that a child had such an experience, but by the time we're adults, our brains have normally found it more advantageous to be squarely grounded in baseline reality.