I have fully immersive dreams. It's not a movie, it's like reality with sight, sound, smell, touch, temperature, proprioception, etc. Also, there generally aren't any of the fantastical, psychedelic, or other "dreamy" things I've heard retold by others or depicted in cinema. It's mostly like each dream sequence is an independent simulation and there's almost no observation of a beginning, end, or transition. I can have lucid dreams, which mostly just introduce a mild emotional detachment.

The least realistic dream aspects are also what will invoke lucidity. My motor skills may break down and I start drifting or swimming when I want to walk or run. I might find it impossible to focus and read printed text or computer displays while it is important to do so. Or if I find myself driving, the dream will usually degrade and abort, with the car driving ahead and leaving me behind where I no longer see its path nor control it. If I've recently been playing video games in waking life, I might fumble for controls to walk and engage the surroundings. But otherwise, the dream sensory world is pretty much like real life, just with fictional places, people, and stories.

However, I am one of those folks on the aphantasia end of the spectrum in waking life. I have no inner voice nor inner vision. All my conscious memories and simulations are abstract for every sense. I might liken it to a 2nd or 3rd order derivative. While awake, I can't really picture loved ones or remember their voices in my mind. But I can think about their present or past location and interactions. I can recollect or imagine ideas of shapes, topology, movement, rhythm, melody, intention, or emotional context. But it's nothing like real sensation.

I've been a voracious reader at times in my life, but there is no movie or soundtrack to books. If anything, the literary experience is almost its own visual modality. It can be somewhat blocky, non-linear, or even atemporal. I do not experience reading as if listening to spoken words nor as seeing words in sequence. It is vaguely like looking at the page and feeling parsed grammatical structures and their semantics at the same time. I don't "see" printed words if I think of a book or think about writing. But I feel the rough outline of text and relationships of ideas. I think reading to me is almost like buffering in memories or knowledge. And, there is a meta-experience where I can reflect on and appreciate the written technique while consuming its content. But the literary meta-experience fades faster than the semantic content.

People around me consider me to be very creative and imaginative. But I'd say my imagination is stilted. I don't think I'll ever produce a novel or a play or a music composition. I can easily come up with vignettes or deviations in the context of an existing story, but don't seem to have the capacity to create a whole piece from scratch. I've dabbled in drawing and writing as hobbies, but my output is very representational. I might render a landscape I like by hand, or capture a moment in verse. But I seem to have no inner drive to imagine and create entire landscapes or stories on a blank slate. With my career, I have done large scale and long term work in service of problems presented to me by employers, but I think I'd draw a blank if I tried to just "create software" of my own volition.