prophantasia
Prophantasia is a rarer form of visualization, when your visualizations are ‘projected’ into your eye’s field-of-view.
“Projecting” is not as magical as it sounds, prophantasia is not like some Augmented Reality experience. The mind’s visuals are interfering with the eye’s visuals, and concentration is required to pull the desired visual into opacity. These visualizations don’t “track” with the real world, they are just occupying the same space as your eyes, if you ‘project’ an image into your field of view, then move your head to look somewhere else, the image will follow your line of sight and move with your head, it’s more like a heads-up-display than a projector.
A good analogy for this would be as such, have you ever looked out a window to view the outside world, then noticed you can see a reflection on the glass, of what’s inside the building, and if you focus on it hard enough you start more clearly seeing what’s inside and losing focus on what’s outside? Prophantasia is like that, except the window is your eyes.
The visuals always remain out in-front of you, and you will not hear someone with prophantasia using the phrase “In the back of your head” because their visuals are not behind their eyes, they are in-front of their eyes.
Prophantasia can also occur with eyes opened or closed, but, unlike traditional phantasia, there is a direct impact on your ability to visualize if your eyes are open or closed—when closed, prophantasia is much stronger because it isn’t having to compete with the bright visual information that already exists in your field-of-view.