"I sometimes think I might get an "afterimage" of a line when I do that, but I'm not sure. Maybe that's a path to try to train up an ability to actually visuali

"I sometimes think I might get an "afterimage" of a line when I do that, but I'm not sure. Maybe that's a path to try to train up an ability to actually visualise things. I keep meaning to try." Another commenter here gave a nice description of some exercises in visualiztion. You might try the simplest of those for a while and see if you get results. If you do, you can try moving to more complicated ones. One exercise was one in which you start with a line and incrementally add more and more 2D figures. I learned a somewhat similar exercise, but using arrangements of 3D figures. The exercise was to start with something simple, like a blue cube, and begin to add more and more additional 3D objects, assign different colors and movements to each, and keep them going stably for as long as possible. I did that exercise for maybe a year or two, and definitely got better at it. That was many years ago; I have since regressed. I had no trouble with the 2D exercises the other commenter gave, but the most complex of them felt like they were getting near my current limit. There are a couple of other things I've done that involved exercising the ability to visualize. I don't know if they'll be helpful to you, but in case they are: One is lucid dreaming. I got this to work by keeping a dream journal next to my bed and writing down my dreams any time I woke up from them. The first effect was that I began to remember a much greater number of my dreams. (According to sleep researchers, everyone dreams every night; we just don't remember most of our dreams at all.) Some time later I began to dream lucidly--that is, I began to have dreams in which I realized I was dreaming. That was pretty exciting at first; I naively thought that I would be able to control my dreams and have wonderful adventures by directing them. That turned out not to really be true. I had some control, but it was not unlimited. To give a representative example, I realized one night that I was dreaming, and resolved to fly to Washington, D.C. to visit some places I knew well. I discovered that I could fly really high and fast, but I couldn't navigate when I did it. I could navigate where I wanted to go, but as soon as I started thinking about that, I would always descend to the ground and switch to walking. But I digress. The relevant point is that during the period when I was practicing lucid dreaming, the world of dreams seemed extra accessible, even when I was awake, and it was easier to conjure vivid imaginary environments in my mind's eye. Perhaps that would be of some help. A second, somewhat similar, thing is that for a few years in the 1980s I was interested in shamanism and in shamanic trance techniques. I had a little training in them and experimented with them for a while. You could look at shamanic trance techniques as ways of initiating lucid dreaming while you're awake. Again, when I was doing that, I had an easier time of conjuring up vivid imagined landscapes, people, and objects. Keeping a journal seemed helpful in both activities. It helped me remember what I experienced, and also seemed to help make those experiences easier to induce.