On the way out of the house, pick up wallet and keys which are always left on the table in the foyer. Keys are there, but where the hell is the wallet? Check the floor to make sure it didn’t fall.
Nope.
Check the drawer in the table - maybe I had a brain fart when I came home yesterday and stuck it in there.
Nope.
Check the table top again. Lift up the TV Guide and push a few nicknacks around to make sure it’s not hiding behind/under something (even though the wallet is too big and the nicknacks are too small for this to be possible).
Nope.
Panic ensues followed by a 20-minute FBI-style “leave no stone unturned” ransacking of the house.
Nothing.
Start blaming the cats, who claim to know nothing.
Walk back to the foyer and express to everybody within earshot how impossible this is. I mean I always leave my wallet RIGHT HERE when I come home.
And as I’m shouting “right here” I look down at the same spot on the table that I already checked seventeen times, and the wallet is… right there.
Same thing has happened with the TV remote control.
Should I start taking a daily multivitamin or something?
It’s obvious to me what’s going on here. You’ll figure it out in a week, when the “Tuna of the Day” club packages start showing up and the credit card bill comes.
This morning, when driving to a business meeting, I went to light a cigarette. I couldn’t find my lighter. My satnav was plugged into the cigarette lighter socket, so rather than fiddle around with that I decided to look for my lighter. I pulled my car over, walked round the car, opened the passenger door, checked under the seat, checked the driver’s side under the seat, checked the door pockets, then gave up.
As I went to pull away from the kerb, I noticed an obstruction to my handling the steering wheel: my cigarette lighter. In my left hand, the whole time.
This started happening to me when I turned 50 and started going through menopause. I figured it was either the menopause affecting my eyesight, or that pixies were real, and had infested my house. Since hiding my washcloth right there in front of me on the shower rack [it was NOT there a second ago] seemed exactly the sort of thing a pixie would do, my money’s on the pixies.
See, with me, it’s even worse. No cats. I live alone. Yet, someone constantly rearranges my stuff in absurd ways. Car keys in the bedroom. Lunch bag, on the table where the keys and change are supposed to go. I can see fine, damnit, but who moved this stuff?
If I ever catch him, I have a gun. It’s . . . in the closet. Yeah. On the top shelf. I’m sure of it.
My darling Marcie goes through this at least three times a week. Fifteen to twenty minutes of panic followed by “I found it.” It, you understand is a variable. But ‘it’ is always in the exact spot it ought to be, which is the first place she looked. And ‘it’ wasn’t there a little while ago. I’ve learned to ignore the panic.
I’m really curious to find out what this condition is called too, I have a pretty severe case of it!
For a while I blamed it on ghosts or some other devious entity pranking me and laughing their asses off. This is still my best theory.
What really disturbs me when such things happen is that I’ve REALLY looked at the spot where said item eventually was found after a long search. Almost each time this has happened to me, I distinctly remember checking said area multiple times looking for the lost item without seeing it (supposedly that is, I still believe the ghosts do it).
And after an intensive search that renders me almost completely nuts, I find what ever was lost right in it’s “spot” just looking at me taunting me and laughing…
In a weird somewhat related way, this is one of the biggest reasons I do not drive. It’s one thing not to see lost items, a completely different story when you’re not seeing ENTIRE vehicles!
I’ve experienced this kind of stuff since I was in my late teens. Strange is that it happens less often as I get older (mid 30s now).
Not really answering the OP question, but…I had this happen to me once in a more literal sense.
I had a headache, and then I became aware of something “funny” about the room I was sat in, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I went up to a mirror and waved at myself, stuck my tongue out etc. And what I realised was that I couldn’t see anything in the centre of my vision :eek:
But it wasn’t as though there was a black blob or anything: I just wasn’t conscious of anything in the middle, the same way you aren’t conscious of a precise outer edge to your vision.
We always blame it on the little blue men forgetting to put the object where it belongs. When you look again, you’ll see that the next crew got it right. (That will make absolutely no sense unless you’re familiar with the Twilight Zone episode linked to.)
No, that’s exactly the opposite. The OP is not asking about changes. The situation is totally static, but part of it is unrecognized by the viewer. So much so that eventually, when the viewer does finally see it, he maintains that someone put have put it there, because it was not there before.
That’s a migraine. A lot of people who haven’t had them think that a migraine is just a bad headache, but it’s a really bad headache combined with foveal blindness and slight aphasia. A side effect of not being able to see anything you look at is motion sickness. The cure is to lie motionless in a dark room until you fall asleep or it goes away. I used to get them in high school, but not once in the 10 years since.
To answer the OP, I’ll guess either an SEP Field or macular degeneration.
I had that happen to me for the first time when I was 19. I was driving to work from school and realized that things in the middle of my visual field were acting like they were in my blind spot. By the time I got to work, the blind spot had evolved into a blind spot surrounded by a psychedelic pattern of sparks and electric-looking lines.
I freaked out, and so did my boss and all of my co-workers; one of them drove me to an opthalmologist because everybody was thinking, but nobody was saying, “retinal detachment.”
On the way to the eye doctor, I was suddenly hit with a blinding (heh) headache and hideous nausea.
Fortunately, it turned out to be the beginning of a (so far) lifelong series of migraines rather than my retina peeling away from the back of my eyeball.
But I don’t think that’s the kind of “not seeing things that are right there” that the OP was talking about.
