This is fascinating to me albiet an obvious source of frustration for you. I’ve been googling since I read it instead of working 
You probably read the Wikipedia entry on Mental imagery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_imagery
and the entry on visual memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_memory
but I found the mention of the possible connection to sleep interesting:
Sleep
Findings surrounding sleep and visual memory have been mixed. Studies have reported performance increases after a bout of sleep compared with the same period of waking. The implications of this are that there is a slow, offline process during sleep that strengthens and enhances the memory trace.[14] Further studies have found that quiet rest has shown the same learning benefits as sleep. Replay has been found to occur during post-training quiet wakefulness as well as sleep. In a recent study where a visual search task was administered quiet rest or sleep is found to be necessary for increasing the amount of associations between configurations and target locations that can be learned within a day.[14] Reactivation in sleep was only observed after extensive training of rodents on familiar tasks. It rapidly dissipates; it also makes up a small proportion of total recorded activity in sleep.[14] It has also been found that there are gender differences between males and females in regards to visual memory and sleep. In a study done testing sleep and memory for pictures it was found that daytime sleep contributed to retention of source memory rather than item memory in females, females did not have recollection or familiarity influenced by daytime sleep, whereas males undergoing daytime sleep had a trend towards increased familiarity.[15] The reasons for this may be linked to different memory traces resulting from different encoding strategies, as well as with different electrophysiological changes during daytime sleep.[15]
This is how I see the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
If you hear a word how do you conceptualize it? I know my kids tell me they see a word in front of them whereas I see the object. But we all suck at math so don’t suppose that can be a connection
This seems really interesting but haven’t read it all:
http://www.imagery-imagination.com/non-im.htm
Have you seen this one?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110511075032.htm
sorry if this disjointed but I’m on the phone with my mom who called me in the middle of this post so should go concentrate on that now