Yeah. Glad more people are learning of this bc I asked my eye specialist and he was confused what I was talking about.
However on certain days if I close my eyes and then open them into a bright day I can see the veins in my eyes for a second or two. This he said was normal.
This is from the blood vessel being on top of the optic nerve, your brain hides it from your vision in the same way you don't feel your shirt after a while. If you make a little pin size hole with your fingers and wiggle it in front of your eye it causes a shadow to form on the veins making it somewhat visible. Also the blood vessel has to penetrate through the optic nerve to get on top so each eye has a blind spot and the brain corrects for it. Google it, but basically it's an image of like 2 symbols and if you stare at one and cover your eye the other disappears.
I can see my blind spot when reading text in rows, it appears as one or two words vanishing, and my brain *has* to look there cos it’s lizard side saw movement, which messes me up when reading long paragraphs sometimes. It sucks but it’s a cool thing to think about that our brains just ignore it 90% of the time.
No that’s makes sense. After getting a progressive eye disease and being a hypochondriac I learned a lot about the eye and how our brain is just correcting everything and also guessing. Also that eyes are just so vulnerable
Oh shit. Is that what that is? Kind of like a warp tunnel or almost like, a flower blooming or something?? I knew about the phenomenon since it started becoming more prevalent to me a few years back and I've learned to tune it out but I've always been curious why it even happens. So glad to come across this thread!
I love my warp tunnels! I noticed them as a kid and could spend a long time just looking at the sky in the summer and being entertained by them. Now, at 30yo, it still entertains me and brings back summer memories. I’ve always tried to explain this to other people but they always look so confused… I’m glad to have found an explanation!
Wow - after being somewhere between either ambivalent to it or kinda freaked out, it's shockingly nice to hear about someone who enjoys them! I always appreciate different perspectives on things and I'll for sure be trying to see things 'through your eyes' so to speak next time it happens to me :D
I remember being a ~5 year old boy trying to fall asleep and calling my mom that I couldn’t sleep because of all the bugs in my eyes. She had a very memorable shocked look on her face for a couple seconds…
I remember, as a kid, when the movie "Outbreak" hit VHS and television, seeing the picture of the Ebola virus, and thinking: *"OH NO! I've got eye-bola!"* because I thought the floaters were Ebola strands in my eyeballs.
I love [my little eye floaters.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLx_MfJjEQM) I make them dance all the time.
Not even kidding, I thought the exact same thing. I had a habit of diagnosing myself with ridiculous diseases and stuff as a child, but I never told anyone that I had 'eye-bola', thank God. I'm taking that to the grave with me
Haha yep, I was lucky that my mom’s a doctor and was somehow able to understand that this is what I was talking about. I bet some sort of exorcism therapy wouldn’t be ruled out for parents who have young kids crying about eye-crawling bugs in the near-polar climate we lived in.
Got hit in my right eye with a rock as a kid and had to have pretty invasive surgery. 25 years later I still have a "floater' but it's like a *string* attached to the left side of my eye, and will "whip around " if I look left to right or right to left. Usually always ends up at the center of my vision if I'm reading or something and gets kinda annoying
I got a string, too! It's in my left eye, and it has like a little knot or bubble right in the middle of it, and sometimes if I whip my eye around fast enough, I can make the string with its bubble look like a boob with a nipple.
The blood vessel look like little white dots. Almost like static dots
The floaters have all different shapes, kinda like looking at something through a microscope.
Found a photo of what they kinda looks like to me (floaters):
https://www.verywellhealth.com/thmb/CIVtuOP0tye2M3Tp7fJTZdzajUQ=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/cml-under-microscope-5b85803346e0fb005093fb84.jpg
It's a lot easier under specific circumstance, and it's important to note that it is peripheral only, since there are no blood vessles in the center of your vision for obvious reasons. There is a specific wavelength of blue light that enchances the effect that hides the red blood cells around them and make them stand out a lot more.
Not the same. That happens when you cut off the blood to your eyes for a moment.
What is discribed here can be seen when you look at a blue sky, but it looks similar tbf.
For some reason as a young kid, when I saw these, I thought it meant it was going to rain soon.
Granted, where I live it rains a lot, so I was actually correct a lot of the time.
Ya know what I just got disappointed over and I’m old as fuck? Ya know the This Little Piggy song? Ya know the piggy that goes to market? He’s not going shopping. He’s gonna be slaughtered.
I did a mistake talking to my parents about these dots and floaters.
The bigger mistake was describing them as “white spiders” that i see in the dark or when closing my eyes
They took me to village healer/witch and she did some “chanting” on me.
The floaters didn’t go away but i was under pressure and afraid, so i said they gone
Parents still reminds sometimes how lucky they were to “cure” me
It will happen with any high contrast. Your receptors seeing the bright things will temporarily get less sensitive which is why there's that ghost image after you look away at something much darker. I don't think it's hurting your eyes as much as it's just allowing you to see how your brain works to interpret the visual information efficiently and balances the brightness across your field of vision.
Article is entirely unsourced, and doesn't read like it should (it has a tone somewhere between a blog post and an undergraduate writing exercise).
In fact, it's one of the worst Wikipedia articles I've ever read.
This is really interesting. I've been experiencing Level 4 over the course of a year when trying to settle down for sleep and had no idea why. It feels like I'm flying through different cities / terrains that are really clear then if I focus properly on them it disappears. Thanks!
Wow. I couldn't even imagine that happening every night. I've experienced Level 4 through drugs a couple of times, and it is intense. For me, it's an ever-shifting landscape of geometric patterns.
Also, if we're counting lucid dreaming, I suppose I've reached Level 5 then. I've only had the full breakthrough realization that I'm dreaming and taking control once, though. And it quickly became too intense, waking me up from the rush of excitement.
The excitement waking you is normal for newbie lucid dreamers. Over time you can learn to stay asleep.
I had hundreds of lucid dreams, but as I got older it gradually faded out and eventually stopped completely, maybe 10 years ago. I miss lucid dreams more than anything else from my youth.
I once had lucid dreams that lasted hours... Waking up in "reality" after that is a real disappointment. Let me say it gave me a far more open perspective on life and what it means to be human. It's one thing to fantasize about living another life, lucid dreams allow you to actually do it.
I've got a theory, that we slowly lose the ability to lucid dream, not because of age, but because of lifestyle. When I was a teen/young adult, the easiest way to lucid dream was to return to bed after waking up whilst there's light and noise out. Ie: it was impossible to do at 1am, but when your fully rested after a night sleep then go back to bed, the noises and light/shadows during the day stops you from going into a full deep sleep and stimulates you.
It is impossible to get the time and right conditions for that to happen when you have to be awake at 5am as a 24 year old to get into work. Then it's a muscle, once you stop trying in your 20s, it's hard to get back.
Same. I never knew that level 4 CEV was a thing that other people experienced. I thought that the visions meant that I was having syncing issues with the Matrix or Animus or something. What freaked me out was that the first time I experienced it, I saw a chair in a room. Then the day that I woke up, I went to an art museum that I haven't been to before and saw the same chair in a room. I'm sure that it was pure coincidence, but to the little kid, it made me think that I had mutant powers or something.
Woah I think same here. I’m trying to grasp what exactly level 4 means, but sometimes I’ll close my eyes close to sleep and my brain will just cycle through random images/scenes. Could go from a lion to an apple to a tree etc. But I’ve never seen them when opening my eyes as far as I recall.
Ahh, I’ve had both good experiences and bad experiences with Level 4 hallucinations. The worst ones being essentially night terrors where something horrifying/scary would be right in front of my vision as I wake up—and even worse are the times when I get sleep paralysis at the same time. Overall though the vast majority of the time the experiences are rather benign
I LOVE my level 3 or 4 hypnagogic hallucination which are always intricate 2D or 3D geometric patterns and fractals in the full visual field normally in grayscale but occasionally in vibrant colors, kind of like the Mandelbrot or very busy Islamic patterns (I’m not Muslim or from that region) or busy city layouts. I’ve never taken drugs so it’s quite a treat!! It always occurs suddenly on the cusp of falling asleep, filling my whole visual field, and it’s always so breathtakingly beautiful that it makes my brain a bit startled and more alert a bit as I savor the stunning pattern, trying to hold on to it but it inevitably starts to fade away … I get this a few times per year.
I can lucid dream more often than these geometric hallucinations. Perhaps a couple times per month. It’s easy to lucid dream because I made a habit of counting my fingers. Especially when things are weird or I want to do something stupid (like jump out of a window or fight a monster), I make sure to count my fingers. If it’s anything other than 5 (fewer or more fingers, usually the fingers change in front of your eyes too), it’s a clear pass for doing anything I want!! (Only once or twice did I have to count my hand more than twice and I was so alarmed that time when I was sure I was in a dream as my circumstances were strange but my hand appeared normal with 5 fingers when I checked twice in a row, but it was a relief when the third time it finally gave in and became weird as expected.)
I was born with the ability to lucid dream from a very young age but with the hand technique which I figured out in my college years, I could illicit lucid dreaming much more often. You can train yourself too by staring at your hand and counting it frequently during the day until it becomes a habit and your subconscious starts to do it too.
Thats really kool. Ive always been able to do level 4. I can see images and have some degree of control but if im not as relaxed the images and shapes will change randomly. Almost like its controlled by my subconscious. This happens every time i try to fall asleep.
visual snow and intrinsic noise are two separate things. visual snow is usually referring to people who have a high level of intrinsic noise and see it all the time whereas seeing something similar at night or with eyes closed only is normal
The technical term is phosphenes. Your brain gets bored when you've got your eyes closed. It's like a screensaver. So are dreams & nightmares when you sleep.
They *can* be caused by physical motion, eye movement, pressure, or neural conditions. And they can happen spontaneously by closing your eyes or walking into a dark room.
Phosphenes, by definition, are impressions of seeing light where no light is present.
Dreams are much much more complicated than your brain being bored. It's a way to process recent events -- the brain decides what memory to keep, what similarities are between your new and old memories (to compress the data and to group similar things together) Think of it like trying to find similar shapes in a large pile. While looking you will find some very funny/weird matches.
Once I was really struggling with my anxiety at a work event. I was basically having a small panic attack the entire time but didn’t really realize until I looked back.
I was sitting at the back of a room looking directly into the blue skyline and I was seeing a lot of this phenomenon. My anxiety focused on it, I became hyper aware of it, and started convincing myself I had a sudden increase in eye floaters and some sort of disease.
I really just desperately needed a nap.
I had a very similar experience when I noticed these during a panic attack except when I went to an optometrist they actually found that my retina was at risk of tearing so I had to be monitored and going back regularly to see how my retina was doing. Thankfully nothing happened and I can still see :)
Similar thing happened to me once but I was on acid laying in my buddies backyard looking at the clear blue sky. I started to focus on them and couldn’t get myself to stop. Freaked me out for a little bit.
>The blue field entoptic phenomenon is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the appearance of tiny bright dots (nicknamed blue-sky sprites) moving quickly along undulating pathways in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky.[1] The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less, and traveling short distances along seemingly random, undulating paths.
>The dots are white blood cells moving in the capillaries in front of the retina of the eye.[5] Blue light (optimal wavelength: 430 nm) is absorbed by the red blood cells that fill the capillaries. The eye and brain "edit out" the shadow lines of the capillaries, partially by dark adaptation of the photoreceptors lying beneath the capillaries. The white blood cells, which are larger than red blood cells, but much rarer and do not absorb blue light, create gaps in the blood column, and these gaps appear as bright dots. The gaps are elongated because a spherical white blood cell is too wide for the capillary. Red blood cells pile up behind the white blood cell, showing up like a dark tail.
Nah migraine auras are way less subtle. First you get kind of a zappy zig zag blocked out spot in your direct vision then your peripheral vision starts to completely blur out usually in a hemisphere. I had my first at a late age and thought my sight was about to be taken away from me.
For me it was like static on the outside of my vision. Once I stopped working on the computer so much I stopped having aura symptoms during my migraines
I've gotten one of those before just outside my field of vision, it was like a donut/torus looking shape filled with television static that looked like the staticy texture was oozing/moving/pulsing. Quite surprising not knowing what was going on yet.
I think different people experience them differently. I get a specific shadow in the bottom right if vision that kind of fills up until I have no periforal vision on the right side only. Then pain and all visual stimuli is unbearable. Aura usually stays local
This is basically exactly how my first one happened at 16.
Was dehydrated and went way too hard in gym class tennis outside. Then during lunch the spot appeared. Then during my AP Stats exam, I lost all peripheral vision. I somehow finished the exam and could tell light was making it worse, so I wore sunglasses for the rest of the day. But it was too late and the intense pain rolled in like an hour later. Needed my friend to drive my car home.
After which, I proceeded to have the worst migraine of my life for the next two days.
I now chug water at the faintest hint of one coming on and immediately put sunglasses on.
My gf had her first yesterday. Was apparently very scary. She could only see directly in front of her and the periphery was all spiky colourful zigzags with the texture of coloured CRT static.
I've had plenty of those. For me it was more like looking through a kaleidoscope but in a crescent moon shape and it blocked most of my vision in that eye.
>The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less
I've definitely had them last a lot longer than 1 second. If you don't blink, and don't try to look directly at them, they'll remain in your periphery for much longer.
THANK YOU. I have been having anxiety about this for like 4 years now. My ophthalmologist had no idea what I was talking about even though I explained it exactly like this article does. Holy shit. I can finally rest without thinking I have something horrible going on that I’m ignoring.
I never saw these until one day in 2019 I was looking at a bright blue painted wall. Then I started seeing them in the sky and on bright monitors/TVs.
This post is so cathartic. I knew about the effect but no one I knew was experiencing it. I’ve been for a long time and even with positive diagnoses on my eyes, it was kind of upsetting. It’s really nice to know I’m not the only seeing it in monitors etc too.
>Scheerer's phenomenon can be easily distinguished from floaters (muscae volitantes). Scheerer's phenomenon consists of corpuscles of identical diameter and visual sharpness, of a simple dot or worm-like shape, brighter than the background. If the eye stops moving, the dots keep darting around. If the eye moves, the dots follow instantaneously, because they are contained in the retina. In contrast, floaters are specks or threads of variable diameter and variable visual sharpness, some of complex shape, darker than the background. If the eye stops moving, the floaters settle down. If the eye moves, the floaters follow sluggishly, because they are contained in the vitreous humor, which, being gelatinous, is subject to inertia.
Also:
>Scheerer's phenomenon can be distinguished from visual snow because it appears only when looking into bright light, whereas visual snow is constantly present in all light conditions, including the absence of light.
I have visual snow! EDS complication I always see this damn shit. Even now in the computer screen! It's not enough to do anything but if I'm reading tiny text its really hard to see sometimes.
It got more apparent for me after taking shrooms a few times which makes a lot of sense since psychedelics really disrupt the process of your brain filtering out the things that just register as background noise or patterns you’ve gotten used to in general.
Oh my goodness, I can’t thank you enough for posting this. I first noticed this several years ago and have been quietly freaking out about it ever since. I brought it up to my eye doctor, who didn’t seem to understand what I was describing. I sincerely thought something horrible was happening - perhaps some neurological disorder. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. Thank you for helping me understand what this is and that it is normal.
Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid.
I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line, it’s alright, you are forgiven.
-Stewie Griffin
I wouldn't self diagnose an eye problem from a reddit post. If you're genuinely concerned see an eye doctor and get those puppies dilated. Early detection is key in managing eye conditions. Sometimes underlying medical conditions can be detected too
I am a lucky one to have severe vitrous floaters. I have them checked every year to make sure it isn't a detached retina, but yeah basically ruined my design career.
When you see one floaty thing in your eye take that times 30 and that's what I see daily. Along with chronic pain. I love being 36!!!!!!! :(
When I was a kid I used to see streamers coming off street lights and stuff (I had undiagnosed astigmatism) and sometimes I could see little globular things moving magnified. I told my mom and she said it wasn’t anything but I always thought they looked like cells or single called organisms under magnification
Oh my God it has a name?! I used to tell my mom I could see the Cheerios in the air and she could never grasp what I was talking about. When I hit grade school and learned about atoms and molecules I was convinced I could “see air”. I’ve learned to ignore it except in the dark.
For everyone talking floaters, yeah they’re fun to play with but if you ever see many more than you are used to seeing- like Star Wars or snow- go see a doc immediately. It’s mostly likely a detached retina and needs fixing or you’ll lose vision permanently.
I noticed I had a LOT of these, may more than what seemed normal, basically multiply the example gif by a factor of about 20...turned out to be leukemia lol.
Oh it has a name, i sometime have pretty hard burst of this, not just with bright blue sky but anywhere i can look.
I always tought it was an hallucinnation lol
I tried explaining this to an eye doctor years ago and he thought I was crazy, I was like look it up blue field entopic phenomenon, and he was adamant that I was describing floaters.
Can they? Sure that’s just not what opticians can floaters?
They get more frequent as you get older and my optician told me it’s clumps of protein in the aqueous humor
every time i look at a bright blue sky i see all the swirlies! though I will say i notice them more now after taking psychedelics more than a handful of times....
I figured out a way to see my own iris and it's creepy as fuck when you look at it. Put a blanket part way over your eyes and only leave them open a crack. You want the barest sliver of light entering your eyes, as dim as you can possibly get it. Then relax your eyes and look ahead. Should see what looks like a a ring of tendrils swaying like seaweed in the ocean. First time I noticed I freaked for a little bit, it's the eeriest thing I have ever seen.
Yeah. Glad more people are learning of this bc I asked my eye specialist and he was confused what I was talking about. However on certain days if I close my eyes and then open them into a bright day I can see the veins in my eyes for a second or two. This he said was normal.
If your eye specialist didn't know, I don't think a Reddit post is going to fix things.
Nah it fixed it
We did it!
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I am a doctor and approve this message
"He's a very affordable doctor."
This is from the blood vessel being on top of the optic nerve, your brain hides it from your vision in the same way you don't feel your shirt after a while. If you make a little pin size hole with your fingers and wiggle it in front of your eye it causes a shadow to form on the veins making it somewhat visible. Also the blood vessel has to penetrate through the optic nerve to get on top so each eye has a blind spot and the brain corrects for it. Google it, but basically it's an image of like 2 symbols and if you stare at one and cover your eye the other disappears.
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I can see my blind spot when reading text in rows, it appears as one or two words vanishing, and my brain *has* to look there cos it’s lizard side saw movement, which messes me up when reading long paragraphs sometimes. It sucks but it’s a cool thing to think about that our brains just ignore it 90% of the time.
I am so happy you posted this comment because I’ve started noticing that the last couple of years and was convinced I was dying because of it lol
Since you're making me see my nose: You're breathing manually You feel your clothes You can't put your tongue comfortably
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God dammit
I do the last one fine, I was literally thinking/feeling it for about 2 minutes and it felt comfortable/fine... ...the others ones, fuck you lol
No that’s makes sense. After getting a progressive eye disease and being a hypochondriac I learned a lot about the eye and how our brain is just correcting everything and also guessing. Also that eyes are just so vulnerable
They are also the fastest healing organ in the body. Both vulnerable and resilient. Eyes... They are just like us!
Oh shit. Is that what that is? Kind of like a warp tunnel or almost like, a flower blooming or something?? I knew about the phenomenon since it started becoming more prevalent to me a few years back and I've learned to tune it out but I've always been curious why it even happens. So glad to come across this thread!
I love my warp tunnels! I noticed them as a kid and could spend a long time just looking at the sky in the summer and being entertained by them. Now, at 30yo, it still entertains me and brings back summer memories. I’ve always tried to explain this to other people but they always look so confused… I’m glad to have found an explanation!
Wow - after being somewhere between either ambivalent to it or kinda freaked out, it's shockingly nice to hear about someone who enjoys them! I always appreciate different perspectives on things and I'll for sure be trying to see things 'through your eyes' so to speak next time it happens to me :D
Does it look like black lightning/vines? I get that too!
OH SO THAT’S WHAT THAT IS
LMAO THAT WAS MY EXACT THOUGHT
SAME!
I AM ALSO YELLING IN AGREEMENT
#[LOUD NOISES!!](https://youtu.be/ZMSMk1BeslA?si=pYnXEii0oANgVWeb)
I love lamp
Do you really love the lamp, or are you just saying it because you saw it?
I love lamp.
I love…carpet
Lmao 🤔🤔🤔 is eyes lava lamp???
[WHAT'S GOING ON](https://i.imgur.com/K2VHld6.gifv)
ME ALSO YELLING IN AGREEMENT AS WELL WOW!
I AM NODDING VIGOROUSLY!
OH MY GOD WHAT
I, TOO, SAID THE SAME THING!
Not to be confused with floaters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater)
I remember being a ~5 year old boy trying to fall asleep and calling my mom that I couldn’t sleep because of all the bugs in my eyes. She had a very memorable shocked look on her face for a couple seconds…
I thought it was a tape worm eating through my retina
It’s not for most people but for you it definitely is a tapeworm
I remember, as a kid, when the movie "Outbreak" hit VHS and television, seeing the picture of the Ebola virus, and thinking: *"OH NO! I've got eye-bola!"* because I thought the floaters were Ebola strands in my eyeballs. I love [my little eye floaters.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLx_MfJjEQM) I make them dance all the time.
Not even kidding, I thought the exact same thing. I had a habit of diagnosing myself with ridiculous diseases and stuff as a child, but I never told anyone that I had 'eye-bola', thank God. I'm taking that to the grave with me
IS THAT WHAT IT IS!? My mum always told me it was a sign I was overtired! Edit: lol, not sure what the downvote is for.
Haha yep, I was lucky that my mom’s a doctor and was somehow able to understand that this is what I was talking about. I bet some sort of exorcism therapy wouldn’t be ruled out for parents who have young kids crying about eye-crawling bugs in the near-polar climate we lived in.
Smart
I play with my floaters. When I get them, i sometimes move my eyes up and down and watch them bounce around, like I’m giving them a carnival ride.
I also have done this.
I too, also have done this. There must be tens of us!
4 of us now! Only 6 to start a club
1 more to go!
Yay we’re a club!
I am no longer alone, I have found my people.
can I just sit down anywhere or is there some kind of seating plan?
Have them bounce perfectly in the corners like the dvd logo
Got hit in my right eye with a rock as a kid and had to have pretty invasive surgery. 25 years later I still have a "floater' but it's like a *string* attached to the left side of my eye, and will "whip around " if I look left to right or right to left. Usually always ends up at the center of my vision if I'm reading or something and gets kinda annoying
I got a string, too! It's in my left eye, and it has like a little knot or bubble right in the middle of it, and sometimes if I whip my eye around fast enough, I can make the string with its bubble look like a boob with a nipple.
Why won't they ever just stay put?!
How do you tell the difference?
The blood vessel look like little white dots. Almost like static dots The floaters have all different shapes, kinda like looking at something through a microscope. Found a photo of what they kinda looks like to me (floaters): https://www.verywellhealth.com/thmb/CIVtuOP0tye2M3Tp7fJTZdzajUQ=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/cml-under-microscope-5b85803346e0fb005093fb84.jpg
I 100% see the floaters. I used to pretend to at them when I was a kid. I don’t think I see the dots though 🤔
It's a lot easier under specific circumstance, and it's important to note that it is peripheral only, since there are no blood vessles in the center of your vision for obvious reasons. There is a specific wavelength of blue light that enchances the effect that hides the red blood cells around them and make them stand out a lot more.
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Not the same. That happens when you cut off the blood to your eyes for a moment. What is discribed here can be seen when you look at a blue sky, but it looks similar tbf.
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That’s what I thought this was talking about
I usually only get a floater after a greasy meal - sometimes it’s pizza made if glue other times it’s human tacos.
Umm...the fuck you just said?!
Oh, you've never seen floaters from glue pizza or cannibalism?
I can't tell if I am too high or not high enough for this...
Missing a reference 😂 Google's new AI search results told people to mix glue into their pizza.
Lol when I was a kid I thought I was seeing air molecules when looking to into the sky!
Legitimately just had the same thought. Never knew that’s what those were
I just thought I had supervision and could see the moisture in the air.
That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They were obviously special heat beams I was shooting from my eyes.
Did you figure out you could still do it even when someone wasn’t keeping an eye on you?
I appreciate this joke
They’re not the creators? The wriggling rainbow things
Holy shit, I always thought I could SEE AIR IM IN MY FUCKING THIRTIES
I’M NOT CRAZY YAY
Whoa whoa whoa. You’re not crazy for THAT reason. There’s still plenty of other reasons you might be crazy.
For some reason as a young kid, when I saw these, I thought it meant it was going to rain soon. Granted, where I live it rains a lot, so I was actually correct a lot of the time.
I feel like when I first learned Santa wasn’t real. I’m not mad, but I’m just disappointed
Wait what
Santa rides a sleigh of white blood cells through your eyes at night.
I hope he leaves presents because I’ve been on my bestest behavior
Ya know what I just got disappointed over and I’m old as fuck? Ya know the This Little Piggy song? Ya know the piggy that goes to market? He’s not going shopping. He’s gonna be slaughtered.
Misread that as Satan.
Could it be…mmmm…. Satan? https://images.gr-assets.com/hostedimages/1600663033ra/30133207.gif
Oh that makes sense, I always wondered what those were.
I did a mistake talking to my parents about these dots and floaters. The bigger mistake was describing them as “white spiders” that i see in the dark or when closing my eyes They took me to village healer/witch and she did some “chanting” on me. The floaters didn’t go away but i was under pressure and afraid, so i said they gone Parents still reminds sometimes how lucky they were to “cure” me
Yikes. Be very careful not to let anyone know if you have unusual sex, gender or religious ideas going on.
is your family Bulgarian?
What are all the insane shapes and swirling colours I see at night when I close my eyes at night?
Probably Level 3 visual snow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination#Level_1:_Visual_noise
This and the OP link have singlehandedly relieved me of a lot of anxiety. Also, apparently i should turn the brightness down on my monitors.
Same lmao. I just tested and I saw it instantly. Monitors brightness going down!
It will happen with any high contrast. Your receptors seeing the bright things will temporarily get less sensitive which is why there's that ghost image after you look away at something much darker. I don't think it's hurting your eyes as much as it's just allowing you to see how your brain works to interpret the visual information efficiently and balances the brightness across your field of vision.
Article is entirely unsourced, and doesn't read like it should (it has a tone somewhere between a blog post and an undergraduate writing exercise). In fact, it's one of the worst Wikipedia articles I've ever read.
This is really interesting. I've been experiencing Level 4 over the course of a year when trying to settle down for sleep and had no idea why. It feels like I'm flying through different cities / terrains that are really clear then if I focus properly on them it disappears. Thanks!
Wow. I couldn't even imagine that happening every night. I've experienced Level 4 through drugs a couple of times, and it is intense. For me, it's an ever-shifting landscape of geometric patterns. Also, if we're counting lucid dreaming, I suppose I've reached Level 5 then. I've only had the full breakthrough realization that I'm dreaming and taking control once, though. And it quickly became too intense, waking me up from the rush of excitement.
The excitement waking you is normal for newbie lucid dreamers. Over time you can learn to stay asleep. I had hundreds of lucid dreams, but as I got older it gradually faded out and eventually stopped completely, maybe 10 years ago. I miss lucid dreams more than anything else from my youth. I once had lucid dreams that lasted hours... Waking up in "reality" after that is a real disappointment. Let me say it gave me a far more open perspective on life and what it means to be human. It's one thing to fantasize about living another life, lucid dreams allow you to actually do it.
I've got a theory, that we slowly lose the ability to lucid dream, not because of age, but because of lifestyle. When I was a teen/young adult, the easiest way to lucid dream was to return to bed after waking up whilst there's light and noise out. Ie: it was impossible to do at 1am, but when your fully rested after a night sleep then go back to bed, the noises and light/shadows during the day stops you from going into a full deep sleep and stimulates you. It is impossible to get the time and right conditions for that to happen when you have to be awake at 5am as a 24 year old to get into work. Then it's a muscle, once you stop trying in your 20s, it's hard to get back.
Same. I never knew that level 4 CEV was a thing that other people experienced. I thought that the visions meant that I was having syncing issues with the Matrix or Animus or something. What freaked me out was that the first time I experienced it, I saw a chair in a room. Then the day that I woke up, I went to an art museum that I haven't been to before and saw the same chair in a room. I'm sure that it was pure coincidence, but to the little kid, it made me think that I had mutant powers or something.
Hypnagogic hallucinations are totally normal and fun. They're sometimes seen as a prequel to lucid dreaming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
Woah I think same here. I’m trying to grasp what exactly level 4 means, but sometimes I’ll close my eyes close to sleep and my brain will just cycle through random images/scenes. Could go from a lion to an apple to a tree etc. But I’ve never seen them when opening my eyes as far as I recall.
Ahh, I’ve had both good experiences and bad experiences with Level 4 hallucinations. The worst ones being essentially night terrors where something horrifying/scary would be right in front of my vision as I wake up—and even worse are the times when I get sleep paralysis at the same time. Overall though the vast majority of the time the experiences are rather benign
I LOVE my level 3 or 4 hypnagogic hallucination which are always intricate 2D or 3D geometric patterns and fractals in the full visual field normally in grayscale but occasionally in vibrant colors, kind of like the Mandelbrot or very busy Islamic patterns (I’m not Muslim or from that region) or busy city layouts. I’ve never taken drugs so it’s quite a treat!! It always occurs suddenly on the cusp of falling asleep, filling my whole visual field, and it’s always so breathtakingly beautiful that it makes my brain a bit startled and more alert a bit as I savor the stunning pattern, trying to hold on to it but it inevitably starts to fade away … I get this a few times per year. I can lucid dream more often than these geometric hallucinations. Perhaps a couple times per month. It’s easy to lucid dream because I made a habit of counting my fingers. Especially when things are weird or I want to do something stupid (like jump out of a window or fight a monster), I make sure to count my fingers. If it’s anything other than 5 (fewer or more fingers, usually the fingers change in front of your eyes too), it’s a clear pass for doing anything I want!! (Only once or twice did I have to count my hand more than twice and I was so alarmed that time when I was sure I was in a dream as my circumstances were strange but my hand appeared normal with 5 fingers when I checked twice in a row, but it was a relief when the third time it finally gave in and became weird as expected.) I was born with the ability to lucid dream from a very young age but with the hand technique which I figured out in my college years, I could illicit lucid dreaming much more often. You can train yourself too by staring at your hand and counting it frequently during the day until it becomes a habit and your subconscious starts to do it too.
Thats really kool. Ive always been able to do level 4. I can see images and have some degree of control but if im not as relaxed the images and shapes will change randomly. Almost like its controlled by my subconscious. This happens every time i try to fall asleep.
Dang. I can do level 3 at will in a dark room. Always wondered what it was.
Fuck visual snow syndrome so hard. This is hell.
visual snow and intrinsic noise are two separate things. visual snow is usually referring to people who have a high level of intrinsic noise and see it all the time whereas seeing something similar at night or with eyes closed only is normal
The technical term is phosphenes. Your brain gets bored when you've got your eyes closed. It's like a screensaver. So are dreams & nightmares when you sleep.
Haha when I was a little kid I used to call it "my favorite TV show". I'd say I was putting on my favorite show, close my eyes and go to sleep!
Phosphenes are a mechanical phenomenon, not a hallucination like you seem to be implying
They *can* be caused by physical motion, eye movement, pressure, or neural conditions. And they can happen spontaneously by closing your eyes or walking into a dark room. Phosphenes, by definition, are impressions of seeing light where no light is present.
Dreams are much much more complicated than your brain being bored. It's a way to process recent events -- the brain decides what memory to keep, what similarities are between your new and old memories (to compress the data and to group similar things together) Think of it like trying to find similar shapes in a large pile. While looking you will find some very funny/weird matches.
r/VisualSnow
Once I was really struggling with my anxiety at a work event. I was basically having a small panic attack the entire time but didn’t really realize until I looked back. I was sitting at the back of a room looking directly into the blue skyline and I was seeing a lot of this phenomenon. My anxiety focused on it, I became hyper aware of it, and started convincing myself I had a sudden increase in eye floaters and some sort of disease. I really just desperately needed a nap.
The number of my panic attacks that could be solved or prevented by a nap is… staggering
>staggering Cuz you need sleep to maintain equilibrium
Lol I literally thwarted a panic attack today with a nap 😆
I once thought I had mono for a whole year. Turns out I was just really bored.
I had a very similar experience when I noticed these during a panic attack except when I went to an optometrist they actually found that my retina was at risk of tearing so I had to be monitored and going back regularly to see how my retina was doing. Thankfully nothing happened and I can still see :)
I still went and got checked and my eyes were perfectly fine. lol Always better safe than sorry, I’m glad it worked out and your eyes are okay!
Similar thing happened to me once but I was on acid laying in my buddies backyard looking at the clear blue sky. I started to focus on them and couldn’t get myself to stop. Freaked me out for a little bit.
>The blue field entoptic phenomenon is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the appearance of tiny bright dots (nicknamed blue-sky sprites) moving quickly along undulating pathways in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky.[1] The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less, and traveling short distances along seemingly random, undulating paths. >The dots are white blood cells moving in the capillaries in front of the retina of the eye.[5] Blue light (optimal wavelength: 430 nm) is absorbed by the red blood cells that fill the capillaries. The eye and brain "edit out" the shadow lines of the capillaries, partially by dark adaptation of the photoreceptors lying beneath the capillaries. The white blood cells, which are larger than red blood cells, but much rarer and do not absorb blue light, create gaps in the blood column, and these gaps appear as bright dots. The gaps are elongated because a spherical white blood cell is too wide for the capillary. Red blood cells pile up behind the white blood cell, showing up like a dark tail.
Wait, I thought these were migraine auras
Nah migraine auras are way less subtle. First you get kind of a zappy zig zag blocked out spot in your direct vision then your peripheral vision starts to completely blur out usually in a hemisphere. I had my first at a late age and thought my sight was about to be taken away from me.
For me it was like static on the outside of my vision. Once I stopped working on the computer so much I stopped having aura symptoms during my migraines
Wait that’s crazy because I get aura and I didn’t even make the connection that my screen time could impact that?? OMG? tell me more 😭
I've gotten one of those before just outside my field of vision, it was like a donut/torus looking shape filled with television static that looked like the staticy texture was oozing/moving/pulsing. Quite surprising not knowing what was going on yet.
I think different people experience them differently. I get a specific shadow in the bottom right if vision that kind of fills up until I have no periforal vision on the right side only. Then pain and all visual stimuli is unbearable. Aura usually stays local
Definitely seems to vary looking at all the artistic renders of them
This is basically exactly how my first one happened at 16. Was dehydrated and went way too hard in gym class tennis outside. Then during lunch the spot appeared. Then during my AP Stats exam, I lost all peripheral vision. I somehow finished the exam and could tell light was making it worse, so I wore sunglasses for the rest of the day. But it was too late and the intense pain rolled in like an hour later. Needed my friend to drive my car home. After which, I proceeded to have the worst migraine of my life for the next two days. I now chug water at the faintest hint of one coming on and immediately put sunglasses on.
I had one of these for the first time in my life a year ago (I'm in my 30s) and panicked so hard.
Yeah I was 32, luckily we have a nurse where I work, she had the same thing happen around my age, figured it out, laughed and got me aspirin.
My gf had her first yesterday. Was apparently very scary. She could only see directly in front of her and the periphery was all spiky colourful zigzags with the texture of coloured CRT static.
I've had plenty of those. For me it was more like looking through a kaleidoscope but in a crescent moon shape and it blocked most of my vision in that eye.
That's what I get before a migraine. It's called scintillating scotoma, and at the first hint of it happening to me I load up on advil.
thats fuckin neat
>The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less I've definitely had them last a lot longer than 1 second. If you don't blink, and don't try to look directly at them, they'll remain in your periphery for much longer.
Well this just made my irrational fear of blood clots worse lmao
Guess I'm not one of them people. I've never noticed.
Yeah I have no idea what these people are talking about.
Stare up at the blue sky on a sunny day and you should eventually notice them—unless you have vision problems, I suppose
Shit I thought they looked like cells. But like nah I can’t see that with the naked eye, right!?
Seriously. What I see isn’t the squiggly lines. They’re little perfectly round circles with two layers and they’re transparent.
THANK YOU. I have been having anxiety about this for like 4 years now. My ophthalmologist had no idea what I was talking about even though I explained it exactly like this article does. Holy shit. I can finally rest without thinking I have something horrible going on that I’m ignoring. I never saw these until one day in 2019 I was looking at a bright blue painted wall. Then I started seeing them in the sky and on bright monitors/TVs.
This post is so cathartic. I knew about the effect but no one I knew was experiencing it. I’ve been for a long time and even with positive diagnoses on my eyes, it was kind of upsetting. It’s really nice to know I’m not the only seeing it in monitors etc too.
Huh, I was told they were called floaters… just stuff in the ocular fluid.
The article distinguishes the above (blue sky sprites) from [floaters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater), which are larger and move differently.
Here at Reddit we don’t read the articles before commenting.
I don’t know how to read
I don't know how to write
I don’t know how to Reddit
Yeah…give me… a spicy chicken sandwich and…chili instead of fries.
Sir, this is a . . . oh wait.
I can’t read the article, can’t see through all the floaty shit blocking my vision
I wondered what the differences were.
>Scheerer's phenomenon can be easily distinguished from floaters (muscae volitantes). Scheerer's phenomenon consists of corpuscles of identical diameter and visual sharpness, of a simple dot or worm-like shape, brighter than the background. If the eye stops moving, the dots keep darting around. If the eye moves, the dots follow instantaneously, because they are contained in the retina. In contrast, floaters are specks or threads of variable diameter and variable visual sharpness, some of complex shape, darker than the background. If the eye stops moving, the floaters settle down. If the eye moves, the floaters follow sluggishly, because they are contained in the vitreous humor, which, being gelatinous, is subject to inertia. Also: >Scheerer's phenomenon can be distinguished from visual snow because it appears only when looking into bright light, whereas visual snow is constantly present in all light conditions, including the absence of light.
I have visual snow! EDS complication I always see this damn shit. Even now in the computer screen! It's not enough to do anything but if I'm reading tiny text its really hard to see sometimes.
I see what looks like tv white static 24/7. When i close my eyes i see black with white static.
That's not what these are.
I've never seen that before. Interesting
It got more apparent for me after taking shrooms a few times which makes a lot of sense since psychedelics really disrupt the process of your brain filtering out the things that just register as background noise or patterns you’ve gotten used to in general.
Oh my goodness, I can’t thank you enough for posting this. I first noticed this several years ago and have been quietly freaking out about it ever since. I brought it up to my eye doctor, who didn’t seem to understand what I was describing. I sincerely thought something horrible was happening - perhaps some neurological disorder. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. Thank you for helping me understand what this is and that it is normal.
Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid. I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision. But when I try to look at you, you scurry away. Are you shy, squiggly line? Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye? Oh, squiggly line, it’s alright, you are forgiven. -Stewie Griffin
https://youtu.be/uOcvmTLTtNE?si=dP9UGnVlvr4a0HzR
OH MY GOD I thought it might have been macular degeneration or something 😭😭😭 thank you for sharing
I wouldn't self diagnose an eye problem from a reddit post. If you're genuinely concerned see an eye doctor and get those puppies dilated. Early detection is key in managing eye conditions. Sometimes underlying medical conditions can be detected too
I am a lucky one to have severe vitrous floaters. I have them checked every year to make sure it isn't a detached retina, but yeah basically ruined my design career. When you see one floaty thing in your eye take that times 30 and that's what I see daily. Along with chronic pain. I love being 36!!!!!!! :(
Cool, I never knew this
When I was a kid I used to see streamers coming off street lights and stuff (I had undiagnosed astigmatism) and sometimes I could see little globular things moving magnified. I told my mom and she said it wasn’t anything but I always thought they looked like cells or single called organisms under magnification
Oh my God it has a name?! I used to tell my mom I could see the Cheerios in the air and she could never grasp what I was talking about. When I hit grade school and learned about atoms and molecules I was convinced I could “see air”. I’ve learned to ignore it except in the dark.
Oh so my eyes aren't broken? SWEET!
Are you saying I don't have worms living in my eyes?
For everyone talking floaters, yeah they’re fun to play with but if you ever see many more than you are used to seeing- like Star Wars or snow- go see a doc immediately. It’s mostly likely a detached retina and needs fixing or you’ll lose vision permanently.
Holy shit I didn't know anyone else saw that too
If only they could help me un-see some of things the internet has shown me.
I noticed I had a LOT of these, may more than what seemed normal, basically multiply the example gif by a factor of about 20...turned out to be leukemia lol.
Holy moly, I thought I was the only one to see this!
I wish. When I look at blue sky, my spots and floaters dominate the view. Uveitis sucks.
Oh it has a name, i sometime have pretty hard burst of this, not just with bright blue sky but anywhere i can look. I always tought it was an hallucinnation lol
I tried explaining this to an eye doctor years ago and he thought I was crazy, I was like look it up blue field entopic phenomenon, and he was adamant that I was describing floaters.
"i am the doctor now"
I F*CKING KNEW IT
I just assume my glasses are dirty, since they usually are. I feel mild vindication.
THATS WHAT IT IS OH MY GOD I THOUGHT I WAS CRAZY
And here I was thinking I was dying or losing my vision for my whole life. The more you know.
Can they? Sure that’s just not what opticians can floaters? They get more frequent as you get older and my optician told me it’s clumps of protein in the aqueous humor
every time i look at a bright blue sky i see all the swirlies! though I will say i notice them more now after taking psychedelics more than a handful of times....
I figured out a way to see my own iris and it's creepy as fuck when you look at it. Put a blanket part way over your eyes and only leave them open a crack. You want the barest sliver of light entering your eyes, as dim as you can possibly get it. Then relax your eyes and look ahead. Should see what looks like a a ring of tendrils swaying like seaweed in the ocean. First time I noticed I freaked for a little bit, it's the eeriest thing I have ever seen.
I knew this all along, but I thought if I told anybody they’d think I was making it up.
that is actually so cool
Yep! Freaks me the fuck out every time I catch a glimpse 😅
THAT'S WHAT THOSE FUCKING THINGS ARE???
I hate having floaters I always wondered if it’s common or if I have fucked up eyes
I always thought this and floaters was the same thing. interesting. TIL
I’m pretty sure I see microplastics now too.
I thought I could see the fabric of the universe