Visualization exercises are something that I love to practice!
There are a couple of things that I like to do. I will stare at a blank, white wall and try to paint colors on it with my mind. I try to make a portion of the wall turn from white to blue or to red or to green. I also like to create shapes on the wall, which are usually quite simple, such as circles or squares or maybe faces. I do that either by seeing patterns in the texture of the wall or by painting colors with my mind and then turning the colors into shapes.
Those are just a couple of examples of things that I like to do to practice visualization while I'm awake.
We can definitely visualize things as clearly as those dots that you had referred to, and even more vivid than that.
Although, I suppose that everything that we see is actually in our minds and not from our eyes at all. The information is transferred from our eyes and then interpreted by our brains. So our eyes, in themselves, are never actually doing the seeing.
The only time that I could say that I am having true, vivid, visualizations, that are as realistic as the images that come from my eyes, are when I am falling asleep. I imagine what I want to see and usually it is quite a faint and transparent image. But as I focus on it more intensely, the image starts to become clearer and more lifelike until it is so vivid that the image is just as clear as when I am using my eyes to see. When it gets to that point, I am pretty much in a dream. Then it feels to me as though what I am seeing is in front of my eyelids even though I am not using my eyes at all to see. I'm not sure if that's related to what your original question was, but that is something that I like to practice as well that I feel improves my visualization ability.
A couple other things that I have personally done to improve controlling my visualizations:
1. I close my eyes and wait until I start to see faint images, shapes, or patterns, and then I try to control them and shape them to what I want.
2. I stare at a wall until I stop seeing with my eyes and then I try to control what I am seeing, which can be as simple as changing the color or changing the extent to which I am seeing with my eyes.
3. I stare at an image like the one I'll attach and I cross my eyes so that the two images (one of each eyeball) overlap. Then I try to see just one of the eyeballs at a time and then both at the same time as they are overlapped. I like to do this to control what eye I'm using to see things with and I feel like the control that I develop from it, helps me with visualizing stuff. Sorry if my explanation is a little bit confusing
eyeball exercise.png
I hope that some of this is helpful.

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