It's not leniency in words. I see images in my mind, with colour and shape. I'd go so far as to say these are literal images. Dreams at night are like participating in a movie, with animations and sounds.

I think about other senses like smell, sound, touch, and taste. I can imagine sounds very clearly in my mind. I can also imagine very well how something would feel to touch, to the point where the imagination is almost as clear as the real thing.

However, what I can do for images, touch, and sounds, I cannot do for taste and smell. And this helps me to appreciate something of what 'aphantasia' might be like, though with different sensations.

I have a question I like to ask people, that I think helps show some external measurable consequence of this. I ask people to tell me how many doors there are going off the hall in their house (it may help you to take a moment to try answering before reading the next part).

For myself, and many others, we imagine a picture in our mind of us standing in the hall, and in the picture we just 'look' around and count off the doors. However, I made an error and missed a door when I did the counting, I forgot to count the door that was behind where I imagined myself standing in the hall, because I couldn't "see" it.

I asked someone with aphantasia this same question, because I couldn't understand how they could answer it (I'm a very visual thinker). He told me (if I understand right) that he does something like tell a story via words, and uses that to somehow enumerate the doors and answer the question. Perhaps his strategy is prone to analogous mistakes like mine, but presumably not the same mistake.

In several occasions, after very intense and new visual stimulus, (e.g. being the first time in a forest, watching "where dreams may come", playing a beautiful video game for the first time, strangely, playing checkers for almost the whole day) i could close my eyes and literally see scenes similar to the scenes that had made impression on me.

After several days the images would fade and i would return to not seeing anything.

So i also wonder if those realistic images i could see in those few occasions are the norm for other people, or if they have not seen such images and describe something else as seeing.

Also somewhat related i have similar experience with sound, while normally i can imagine music as my inner voice singing, but on some occasions i could hear the whole orchestra. And here as well, people describe different experience from hearing to not having an inner voice at all.