Aphantasia is a "condition" where you can't picture things in your mind; I read a few articles about it, and feel like I don't have it, but have something close to it, and would like to know if it has a name.
Aphantasia seems to be a very "strong" condition: in the articles I read, people that described it seemed to not be able to picture anything, e.g. the founder of Mozilla Firefox said he thought "counting sheep" was a metaphor. Now I don't feel anything that strong because I can picture some things, and so I'm wondering if the following "symptoms" are just a normal thing about picturing stuff in your head (it might just be), or if it's a "near-aphantasia" condition, and if it is, if it has a name:
What I can picture is very dim, that is, I can't have a very clear, precise picture in my head. For instance when I try to picture the face of someone I know (which is part of the examples the articles gave) I can see something for a few seconds but it's very fuzzy, doesn't have clear cut boundaries and it disappears quickly, so I'm unable to keep a mental image for more than a few seconds. The same thing happens for landscapes, or any picture that I'm familiar with. It also happens for geometric shapes (I do maths for a living, so I'm often confronted to the situation of having to visualize shapes)
When I manage to visualize things, not only are they very fuzzy as described above, but I also lack control on said representations. To give an example of what I mean, sometimes when I can't sleep I try to actually count sheep (doesn't work, if you were wondering), but it's very hard to make them just go over the fence that I tried to imagine : very often they'll resist and go backwards by some sort of external force, and when I try to push them forward I am often obligated to make the whole world that I tried to picture tip over so that they are forced down by gravity; but even then I can't control the tipping and everything just blows up with me losing control and the sheep just not obeying. There's a similar phenomenon when, e.g., I think of skiing : I try to picture myself skiing (it's of course just an example) but I can barely control what happens (even though in real life I'm a decent skier) and always end up doing (unwanted) barrel rolls in my head and crashing down, although I specifically try to visualize myself not doing that.
So there are these two phenomena : I can't visualize properly, but not to the point of aphantasia, that is, I can visualize some amount of things, just not properly; and I don't have control over what I do manage to visualize.
I don't know if they're related but they're both of the type "I can't visualize properly".
My specific questions are therefore :
Is this a "special" condition, or is it just something that everyone has and it's just how visualization works ?
If not, do they have a name ? Are they related somehow ?
