Uh, it’s so difficult! I’ll try to organize how I see my imagination leaving aside what I see with it (edit: I filled it with examples). I use Ne.
ONE-WORD SUMMARY: Unfolding/Fractal/Organic
ANALOGY: “The Neverending Storyâ€
-Example: A leads to Aa, Ab and Ac; Aa leads to Aa1, Aa2, Aa3… the same with the others until Brain collapses. Like following hyperlinks and opening tabs and tabs and tabs of circumstantial information that at some point becomes more important than the original idea. Grows in different directions at the same time and is able to make connection between branches that have nothing to do with each other. This is why I have trouble speaking most of the time: my mouth picks parts of each idea going on in my mind at the time and the result is horrendous.
RELIES ON: percepted experiences (memories, shapes, sounds, texture, taste, smell, concepts –I don’t know if for others the 5 senses are important, but my mental creations need to be felt by all of them… I wish ideas could be loaded into flashdrives, so others could “feel†the idea themselves) and ability to deconstruct the objects into pieces, isolate these pieces, distort them and apply them to everything.
-Example 1: Imagine a person, recall their voice, isolate the voice and have fun applying it to random people, or objects.
-Example 2: I listen to a song, I like the bassline, I can “turn off†the rest of the instruments in my mind and build a new melody on it.
-Example 3: I write stories and novels (all unfinished, sadly) and I like “living†the characters in my head, so I grab a grey 3d model of a human body and I customize it until I feel its exterior matches the personality I want it to have.
FORMULAS:
1. Percepted experiences (real component) + completely new situation (possibly nonsensical –either humorous or dramatic) = metaphors (something as something else), or extrapolation (concepts applied to stuff it shouldn’t be applied to).
–Example: once a friend was telling me about her drama with her boyfriend but was adding many details about her sex life I din’t want to know about, so I asked her if she could treat her lady parts as parentheticals: if she took away what happened in between them I could understand the story all the same.
2. Note: likes engaging in abstract concepts as long as it can apply them to weird stuff and create its little monsters. Abstract ideas that remain pure, like Plato’s, are boring, time-consuming.
3. Zero judgement about its little monster creation: everything can be used for everything. –Example: the friend who introduced me to MBTI (also INTP) told me the story of a metal band who had a real goat head on stage. This happened like a year ago. Every time something good/bad/weird happens, it’s the goat’s fault. By now, we have a thick “Catalogue of goats and sayingsâ€, which is complete nonsense, yet every time we read it we laugh ourselves to tears -> “Goationary (n.): Second part of this book that includes concepts not related to goats. It is called “Goationary†because, eventually, everything has to do with goats.â€
4. Never knowing when it’s enough. Truth: it never is.
FAVOURITE QUESTIONS: “Why not?â€/ “I wonder what would happen if…â€
FOR IMAGES/WRITTEN IDEAS: Images in my mind are actually 3D. I zoom them in and out, change the “camera’s†place, change illumination, characters, furniture, landscape. Details are essential. If I’m thinking of a scene I want to draw or describe, my mind has to provide an accurate render: where things are positioned, whether they have dust on it, fingerprints, etc. Then I start wondering why I want a fingerprint to be on the coffee table, so then I imagine a previous scene of someone touching the coffee table to place some papers on it, and then I wonder what those papers say, and then I imagine the papers, the font they’re written with, and then I wonder who wrote them and why they chose that font and what’s their life story… and it continues till forever. My imagination process goes backwards. I imagine first the scene I want and then I build the story by asking a why and a what-if for every single cm squared of image I’ve thought about.
I sense my description deviated to the “creation†part of imagination. Aristotle’s phantasia (imagination) was related to the ability of bringing back to the mind “archives†(memories) we had previously collected. I think, as I mentioned above, that my way of doing that is through metaphors. I probably fail to speak literally because I think with metaphors and “potentials†(as in “this is like this, but it could be like…†–it may be possible or completely nonsensical… more likely nonsensical).
I hope this helps! If I have another idea about my imagination process, I'll edit this post.