Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
* (1) Seeing inside your head.
* (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else.
* (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes)
* (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.
People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.
There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.
EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.
Mind's eye/visualisation/phantasia is not seen through one's physical eyes. From how I've heard people explain it, it's:
* (1) Seeing inside your head. * (2) Feels like seeing behind you or/and somewhere else. * (3) Seeing through another set of eyes (mind's eyes) * (4) As if I just saw something, but not with my own eyes.
People can have no mental imagery or visual perception in one's thoughts, aphantasia, to very low/unclear/fuzzy/uncertain mental imagery (hypophantasia), to regular phantasia, which is not as real as looking through one's eyes, and hyperphantasia, where it's almost as good or as good as seeing through one's eyes (the fidelity, resolution, etc.)
Then there's also "prophantasia", or the ability to project visuals in one's visual physical scene, or what one might describe as being able to visually hallucinate. These are the visuals one can see through one's eyes. Prophantasia also is on this low (being able to voluntarily project unclear shapes in the visual noise in one's eye lids in the dark), to high (being able to project "holograms" in one's visual scene).
When people talk about it online they seem to not disambiguate between these visualization modes.
There are potentially other modes of visualization out there that I don't know of.
EDIT: your imagination can also happen in other sense modalities, including sound, olfaction, taste, bodily sensation, etc.