I think that sounds normal. The mind's eye is more like evoking the sense of seeing something without actually seeing it.

This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.

I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.

You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.

My mind's eye doesn't care whether my eyes are open or closed. I can copy things back and forth between "reality" and "internal reality" quite seamlessly, so I can either keep my eyes open and bring things from my mind out into reality, or I can close my eyes and bring things from reality into internal reality. I don't strictly speaking have to close my eyes for the second one, but for example if I need to picture the room I'm in from another angle, but it's an inappropriate time to move from my seat, I can just copy the whole room into my mind, either close my eyes or unfocus and ignore my eyesight for awhile, and move things around inside my head. If there's a lot going in in the room, it's sometimes easier if I actually close them so I can spin the room around to the perspective I need.

Yeah also same. But I'm trying to clarify for a lot of people who think they don't visualize because the bar is set where they think that they have to close their eyes in order to visualize things.