I’m being horizontal on my couch. There’s a window directly in front of me. Outside of which is greyness (it being a cloudy day). I am not looking at anything, but rather staring idly while pondering.
There, before me, are the glowing worms. Leeetle teeny ones. I’ve seen them many times before and figure it’s normal but always wondered what it was I’m seeing. I’m guessing it’s not the electrical activity in my brain reflected on the front of my eyeballs, though that’s a fun idea; the worms travel too slowly.
They appear, travel a short while (maybe a quarter- to a half-second) and then are gone. Hundreds of 'em. I could sit and watch them for a while longer but thought it might be interesting to finally find out what I’m looking at. Please enlighten me.
Nope. Not floaters. I also got floaters. Tons of the (expletive deleted) things. Defintely not them at all. Floaters float, look like bubbles, though grayish, and stay and stay and stay. Annoying as all get out. But that’s not this.
Picture seeing several hundred tiny shooting stars all travelling within the confines of a circle. They’re bright and glowing and they appear, travel a bit, and then disappear. I’m pretty sure I’m looking at an internal process but not sure exactly which.
But it is absolutely not floaters. It almost looks like this but they’re thin and glowing and moving at speed across a transparent surface since I can still see of course. My vision isn’t hampered by it - it’s as if they were on a pair of glasses I’m wearing. But I’ll only see them if I stare into a blank space like sky.
Possibly not. There’s are visual oddities that shows up when you stare at a bright, uniformly colored field too long; either short lived little niggly wormy things where the color is slightly messed up, or expanding bands of (slight) darkness. Neither is the result of floaters. They may be some sort of phosphene, but I’ve never found a decent description or explanation of them.
That said, here’s an interesting piece on some of the more commonly noticed types of visual disturbances
That said, here’s an interesting piece on some of the more commonly noticed types of visual disturbances
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I should’ve mentioned (at the risk of sounding like a total case) that I also see the ‘flashes’ from time to time. I’ve had umpteen opthamalogical exams to see if my retina’s detatching but it’s not. Again, those, as well as the light show you get from rubbing your eyes, are all distinctly different from my glowing worms.
I was just figuring that, sort of the same way you can see an ‘image’ of the inside of your eyeball when optometrist is shining his light around, I’m ‘seeing’ an image of some physical function. After all, the retina’s a hunk of brain so I was thinking I might be ‘watching’ the brain at work. Except for that the electrical charges in the brain must travel much faster than .5 to .25 of a second.
I was one of those little kidlets with glasses so I guess the ol’ eyeballs have been under stress for a while, hence all the stuff I see. But this just appears to be me observing something that’s going on someplace betwixt my brain and the outside of my eyeballs.
Funny, I figured this was a common phenomenon. Maybe because I’m myopic I’m focusing on something that people with normal vision can’t.
You might be experiencing an aura, maybe from an impending migraine. I get them all the time (though mine aren’t glowing worms - more like patches of unfocused fuzziness at the periphery of my vision, occasionally speckled with glowing spots.) The headache itself might not manifest until later, which can make it difficult to match one with the other.
Appreciate the suggestion but nope. It only happens if I happen to be staring at something (usually the sky) and is never followed by a headache or anything else. It appears to be an ongoing process which I only observe when I focus my eyes a certain way against - well, really it only happens when I look at the sky, I think. It doesn’t come upon me. It doesn’t interfere with my vision in any way. I can focus away from it and it’s gone. I just very rarely stare at the sky randomly so I don’t notice it often.
I think I’ve seen this too. I liken it to the phenomenon that happens when I look at an extremely large and/or bright light source - say, a car’s headlight up close - I start to see small black spots blip in and out across the brightness. It’s like my visual cortex doesn’t know how to process the signal. The same goes for looking at a large field of color so uniform that it completely lacks detail - little black spots blipping in and out. Sometimes they go away after blinking, and sometimes an afterimage of something else will make them disappear.
Just out of curiousity, Quiddity, but do you have astigmatism?
I have a little astigmatism but I haven’t always had it. I remember seeing these glowy wormy things when I was a teenager. And I’m …um… not one anymore.
We’re talking about ‘seeing stars’, aren’t we? - intensely bright artefacts that zoom inwards from the edge of the visual field and vanish towards the middle?
I’ve only ever experienced this as a result of sudden exertion - sometimes a violent sneeze will trigger them, or just standing up too quickly - in fact I would tend to think that experiencing them under relaxed conditions such as the OP describes could be cause for concern.
Nope. Picture a petri dish. Picture a couple hundred tiny shooting stars travelling in all directions everywhere in that dish. No exertion. Whenever I happen to stare into the air with the sky as background.
