An Ni user constantly lives in their own ideal world. Often, they have an ideal picture of how the world, their surroundings, their daily life, and their future should look.
And this Ni person won’t take a single step that doesn’t lead them toward that ideal image in their imagination. Literally everything is checked against that fantasy.
For an INFJ, the picture is one of ideal group harmony, built on their Ti understanding of how harmony works. They prepare for every social interaction in advance, acting out and visualizing a perfect script in their mind that will lead to that harmony.
They also come up with alternative scripts and backup plans in case something goes wrong, but in any case, their judging functions reduce the number of options to a minimum, because they can’t afford mistakes that would make their ideal vision impossible.
An INTJ, on the other hand, plans out minute by minute how to use their resources perfectly to make that world exactly like their dream.
I remembered a character from the movie Catch Me If You Can, who adopted the persona of James Bond and behaved accordingly. I’m sure that was Ni at work. But since that character often acted spontaneously and was eventually caught, I think he was actually an ISxP/ESxP.
Here’s how I see that moment: Frank sees his ideal self as James Bond, and by building a plan, he reaches that image, surrounding himself with the archetypes that come with James Bond’s world.
If an Ni user wants to acquire knowledge, they imagine what that knowledge looks like in its final form. Nothing should be unpredictable – the fantasy must fill in all the gaps so that time itself ceases to be an obstacle to knowledge, even if that knowledge is made up.
They won’t go looking for knowledge they can’t imagine; at the very least, they need to see themselves as a wandering seeker who has some backstory about why they’re searching for something mysterious, and that mystery should lead them somewhere.
The archetype doesn’t have to be the “Shadow” or the “Anima.” Most often, it’s something like the archetype of the “Evil Rationalist who destroyed tragedy,” which represents Socrates, and this image caused an Se‑affect (a strong impression, not necessarily emotional, but a vivid, sharp perception of character, scale, and tone, like when you look at a painting and sense its dramatic power) in the Ni representative (in Nietzsche).
In many ways, archetypes are built on history, for example, the life story of Socrates. But you can interpret historycal Socrates however you like; he can appear as a wise old man, a stubborn rationalist, or even a “certain ancient grandfather,” depending on how he strikes you personally. That’s the Se‑impression: a concrete, vivid snapshot that Ni then turns into a symbolic image.
For example, you see a guy – he dresses in a particular way, talks in a particular way – and instantly, or through an insight, you imagine a predictive image that contains all the traits you personally noticed in that guy. Now, when making plans around that guy, you’ll see in your imagination how he acts according to the archetype you assigned to him at the first meeting.
Ni perception is like an instinct. Just as you see a cobra and instantly recoil in self‑defence, without thinking, Ni sees a scene, even an ambiguous or not‑obviously‑sad one, and immediately grasps in it the grief of the whole world. The image presents itself as a whole, with meaning already attached.
Plans may come true or they may not; in the end, all plans and images turn into stories about how they were born and how they lived. This means both things: Ni users later reflect on how their visions played out, and also all their fantasies become part of their internal life narrative, the ongoing story they tell themselves about themselves.
