I'm a 2 on this scale. I can "see" the image. But it's not like it's in the world in front of me. It's not like 3D goggles have drawn a virtual object on the table in front of me. If I'm picturing a football, I'm not just imagining the football; the picture in my mind is of the lawn, and trees, and sun, and whole environment where I am standing looking down at a football.

When I picture something, I can see it clearly, it's in my mind's eye. I see it, but it has it's own environment. It's like my eyes are outputting the actual primary PC desktop, and my mind's eye is a separate virtual desktop in a different area, but running off the same processor. For people who haven't experienced this, I would describe it like dreaming. In a dream you're seeing things, but not with your eyes. It's like a dream scene, but my eyes are open and I'm getting visual input too.

I often zone out, or miss parts of what people are saying because I can easily start concentrating on my mental imagery. I find online video meetings incredibly difficult to keep up with because I can easily end up re-living some other fun activity I did recently and concentrating on that instead. I have a bunch of fidget toys on my desk to get me through these online meetings (if I focus on the fidget toys, then my mind doesn't go to its secondary virtual desktop).

No, I see things in an internal space that doesn't exist physically.

It's difficult for me to intentionally do; if I'm just thinking it happens naturally but trying to force it to happen so I can study it is difficult. But it's not like I hallucinate objects into the room with me. Like, I'm looking at a table across the room, and I'm imagining a pepsi can sitting on it. My mind re-creates the image of the table with the pepsi can on it.

Something I think I'm noticing: My "mind's eye" doesn't have peripheral vision, I get a fairly narrow field of view that's about like my central vision. I don't imagine in widescreen.

The way I would describe this would be to make another comparison to thinking in general. Do you have an internal narrator, or have songs get stuck in your head? If you do, you are thinking with your "mind's ear," so to speak. If you are at all familiar with this concept, even if you can't imagine absolutely anything you want to hear, it's a great analog for what it's like to use your "mind's eye." In the same way you don't literally hear what you think, you don't actually see what you think either. You just use those parts of the brain to create the sensation and experience it in some way. It doesn't overtake your primary vision and literally activate photon receptors in your eyes, but it can distract you from that sensory information since you're using that area of the brain.

Really I am interested in how literal your girlfriend is there, because if that's not a miscommunication, that just sounds like on-demand hallucination. I could clearly imagine something in front of me. I could manipulate it, I could imagine any of my senses to interact with the object, but at no point does it appear to literally exist in the world as if it's a hallucination. That would be an insane ability to have, and I don't think that's what people generally mean when they use their "mind's eye."

No, I see it as though it's on another "layer" entirely. Also, when I'm focussing on one layer, the other ~80% slips away from my perception.