OP's description of waking imagination matches mine and I dream vividly. In fact, for a while I tried to lucid dream and as I watched myself call asleep there would be an instant of sudden clarity. Like a light switch had turned on and whatever I was thinking of would jump into view, fully colored and textured. The difference to the vagueness of my normal imagination was so striking I would jolt awake. Same with sounds; I will get beautiful, complex music pouring into my head as I drift off. While awake, I hear noises I imagine but instead as if I were making sounds with my throat. I can't hear Beethoven but I can hear myself hum the notes even without doing so.

So I can say with some confidence that both extremes exist in the literal sense and this is not at all just a matter of describing the same qualia differently.

Honestly the questions given in the test don't seem to well capture my abilities. I have no ability to recall my own mother's face, but I can is of reconstruct it from facts I know (length of her hair, shape of her jaw, anything I've noticed explicitly). I get sensations of colors in short bursts if at all, it is not a dimness. And motion, rotations, and spatial relations feel real to me even if I can't see them. When it tells me to imagine a rainbow I don't see color, but I feel it's arc in the sky, even trace it mentally with imaginary hands. That aspect is not dim and vague. Makes me wonder if the author of this test either did not have this condition or had it in a different way than I.

Rarely, if ever, and never as images. If your dreams are like movies, mine are like stumbling through a dark house.

A lot of my dreams I recall mostly as sensations, eg, I'll recall the sensation of being scared, but not any particular stimuli causing me to be scared.

@cottonseed, @sall, @x3n

How do you remember faces or your house, or your car?

This is not about memory, it is about what you can access consciously. Those of us who have no image in our minds have memories of our houses, cars, friends, etc. just like you do (as far as I know!), they are just not part of our conscious experience. If you want to relate to this, think of language processing: you are not aware of how your brain parses the sentences you hear, though you still have access to the meaning that is produced by that parsing. We don't have access to the visual images, but they are there somewhere and can be used by our memory system. (ps. I suspect that getting images to reach consciousness or not is not just a random 'accident', but rather reflects a more generally different brain organisation -- just not wrt memory having access to visual representations or not)

Rarely with any color. Mostly about moving through terrain and spaces, but the sensation is only partially visible.