This happens to everyone right? When I close my eyes at night I “see” patterns of bright multi-colored shapes (flowers, stars, squares etc.) spinning and bobbing around, until I fall asleep. It’s sort of like looking through a kaleidoscope. It can actually be sort of entertaining at times. I’ve never heard anyone else mention this though, and started wondering if it’s normal.
So, what do you see when you close your eyes, color or just blackness? Anyone else wonder if something their body does is normal?
It happens to me. I like to enhance the experience by pressing on my eyeballs. If you press down on your eyeball, and move it around slightly, you can get incredible psychedelic effects. With a little practice, you can even see Timothy Leary!!!
That only happens when I’m drifting off to sleep and a sudden noise startles me. At that point I briefly “see” the sound as sort of dim shapes that tend to resemble the sound in a kind of visual onomatopoeia – actually, if I had to compare it to anything, it would be like seeing an oscilloscope responding to sound, though perhaps a little more “graphic” in that the shapes have thicker lines and can be very dimly coloured.
IIRC it happens to everyone, but less so as you get older. I know mine have calmed down a lot, and I wondered why until I read that. I would generally get a chessboard-tunnel effect, with figures superimposed on that. Sort of like if the old Doctor Who intro sequence had had squares instead of swirlies. Or I would get glowing donuts that would change color.
Apparently it’s not too uncommon. As a kid I would get technicolor patterns of concentric squares. Nowadays, I’m lucky to get black & white reruns of Hee-Haw.
I was also one of those kids that pressed their eyeballs for the psychedelia. If you do it too long before letting go, you get an ache and it takes a few seconds for normal vision to return. But the effects were so worth it! Of course, being children, we solemnly assured each other that it would lead to blindness, or even death (from pressure on the brain).
The first time I remember these was the night after seeing Star Wars for the first time - For many years I saw repeating receding rings of fire that were very much like the escape pod in which 3P0 and R2 escaped the Tantive IV (and entirely unlike a Johnny Cash song). Sometimes they were so bright it was distracting, but I kind of miss them now
It happens to me, too. It’s like a field of moving pinpricks of light and circles and forms that never fully coalesce into a clear shape. If I try to follow one to see it in focus, it drifts out of “view”.
I think that’s because you’re stimulating the retina on that side and tricking it into thinking that there’s actual incoming light (which would have to be coming from the opposite direction).
BTW, Isaac Newton poked his own eyes about in ways like this - he even inserted a bodkin into his eye socket alongside the eyeball so that he could press on the back of his eye.
I do this too!