What do you see when you close your eyes?

Maybe I'm weird, but over my many years I've spent some time looking at the designs I see when I close my eyes or rub them when they are closed. Lots of geometric shapes and colors.

Recently I put my hands over my eyes after being in the sun and I saw black with a bluish glow. I thought it would be cool to try and recreate it. The problem with this is that what you see is indestinct and really hard to describe. Maybe we really aren't 'seeing' but rather sensing the cones and receptors in the eye. Don't know but just for that reason it makes a neat challenge. Maybe you all 'see' better than I do. Am curious to see :) what you do see.

I think you 'see' complementary colours when you close your eyes for one thing. Try looking at a curtained window - in daylight or, better, with a street light outside - then turning your head away and closing your eyes. To get to sleep I used to try and concentrate on the images behind my closed eyelids - a lot morphed into faces which stayed for quite a while, disturbingly the mouths were often moving as if speaking! Doesn't happen so much now sadly [twitch!] but there again I don't have trouble getting to sleep nowadays ... hopefully! :)

Lol @ John, I can almost see them speaking too :) Monday I'll try to post something like what I see at the moment I'm drawing. Thanks for sharing your experience and I'm glad you can sleep :)

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What do you see when you close your eyes?

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If I've had a very long day and not gone to sleep when I needed it, I see wonderful moving cloudy shapes from which I can make out all sorts of pictures :D;

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What do you see?

I seem to remember you doing some challenge threads like this Steve ... I wasn't very good at them either :p:D

Two Cats ... face on?

I get these geometrical shapes when I apply pressure on my eyes when closed. I used to do this before sleeping when I was young and I didn`t
feel sleepy enough yet. An inbuild kaleidoscope ;)

Seems like you get a dark image of the last thing you were looking at. I don't see bright colors at all.

So I kind of made this up based on what I thought I was seeing.
I know it's a bad composition. As far as the animation goes I'm not exactly sure why some things are happening or even where they came from, I've been working on this for the past couple of days. So with that said I'm going to post anyway eventhough it's kind of a mess and not exacly what I was trying to achieve. Oh well!

That's a great animation, Larry. When I look at it, it's like I'm looking at it with my eyes closed. :D
Saludos,
Bob.

Thanks Bob,
I need all of the encouragement I can get.
Today is Independence Day in the USA, Probably won't be many (if any) fireworks or BBQ in this neck of the woods though because it's raining Cats-n-Dogs.

I too get the geometric shapes but there's lots of graininess in my 'image'. It also seems 'square' to me, not round like Steve sees.

The animation is fantastic! I like all the floaters. That's pretty much what I see when my eyes are open except for the black background. I have lots of floaters. They can drive you crazy, lol.

Credit goes to Boris on sciforums for this nice concise reply...

*Note from me... Please, if you notice any new changes in vision, halos, floaters, etc... let your doctor know. Many serious conditions can cause these visual changes.

Those "colors" and "patterns" are nothing but retinal noise. The human retina is actually a pretty noisy light detector, but usually when there is abundant input there is enough signal present to overwhelm the noise to a point that the noise is not noticeable. When you get into a very dark room or close your eyes, you lose the signal and the noise takes over. There are ways to amplify the noise by mechanically stimulating the retina -- e.g. apply some mild pressure to your eyeballs.

The "negative" images you see when you look at an object for a long time, or at a bright light for a short time, and close your eyes -- are also artifacts of noise. The human retina is just an array of photoreceptors. By holding an image over the retina for a long time, or exposing the retina to a very bright image, you "tire out" the receptors that were receiving the brighter parts of the image. When you close your eyes, all receptors produce noise -- but those that are tired produce less noise. So, you end up seeing a "negative" image.

For example, the human retina has three distinct color receptors -- that detect red, green and blue light. Try this experiment: get a green sheet of paper, and paste a red circle on it. Hold the assemblage in front of your eyes so that it covers your entire field of view, and try to hold your gaze fixed on the circle. After a few seconds, close your eyes and cover them over by your hands, so as to enhance the 'darkness'. You will see an aquamarine circle superimposed on a magenta background -- a negative image of what you were looking at. That's because among the receptors that received light from the circle, the red-color ones are tired and produce less noise, while the green and blue are not tired and their noise overwhelms the red noise. So, where there used to be a circle you see a mixture of green and blue -- aquamarine. Similarly, among those receptors that were looking at the green background, the green are tired while the red and blue are producing most of the noise -- so you see a mixture of red and blue, or magenta.

Another cool experiment to try, is to hold a plain green, red or blue sheet in front of your eyes so as to cover your entire field of view, for a minute or so. Then take it away, and you will experience a 'color-filtered' world. That's because this will tire out one type of color receptors in your eye, and they will not produce as much output as they would if they weren't tired -- the perceived effect being as if there was less of that hue of light in the world. For example, if you were holding a green sheet in front of your eyes, when you take it away everything will take on a magenta hue.

Sometimes you get black/white silhouettes from looking at bright pictures. White light is a mixture of red, green and blue (among other wavelengths) -- so it stimulates all of your color receptors equally. When a cluster of all three types of receptors becomes more "tired" than the surrounding receptors, what you see is a dark spot on a lighter background.

Of course, these effects dissipate gradually, as your retina restores its balance. So don't worry about permanently screwing up your eyesight, have fun!

Very consice and interesting infromation. I meant to start the thread to see if people could recreate what they see in an image but I didn't even do it. I tried but I couldn't get it to look like what I see. That 'seeing' isn't really seeing at all.

With Laura's acoustic neuroma and detached retina, she saw various things that were difficult to describe. Her description was that of colors flowing in her vision. Black floaters were from blood. You can lose your vision completely.

Rich

I hope that Laura is under a doctor's care. Would be terrible to lose her sight.

Laura's interpretation.

A retina tear may repair itself. In the other case, you have about 24 hours to get it fixed. This happened in each eye about a year apart.

Rich

Such a beautiful image/view created by her injury. I send prayers to Laura.

I didn't need to close my eyes. I remember seeing multiple keyboards floating in space. It was difficult to know which one to use. When I turned my head, it took a while before I would see the changed view. It was a very strange feeling.


rich

What i "see" when i close my eyes depends on my "head space"...
As when ones eyes are closed (especially in a dark room) there is very little (if any) visual input to the eyes and I guess once ones visual receptors settle down one does not really SEE anything...

And any perceptions of a visual or even quasi-visual nature, one may experience hence forth could then be considered to be born of mind (or what ever other yet unfathomable higher faculties we humans posses.

But i have to confess that i'm not one of those lucky (and rare from what i have read) individuals that is able to see in the "mind's eye" imagery virtually as vivid as nearly as detailed as if one does with the eyes open...

(and I have read that this most highly prized faculty is said to be directly related to (if not exactly) clairvoyance itself...i.e. that famed an much misunderstood faculty where people can to a very high degree, avail themselves of their visual cortex to "see" (experience very real image of) what they may be thinking about, remembering or experiencing mentally.
Where by the average person may only experience crude or very crude imagery (by comparison...).

I digress...

I don't normally see / experience a very similar "visual" with my eyes shut thinking about something that happened ETC. than i did being there and actually seeing it.

Although i have to confess when occasionally in weird mental states especially round about the hynagogic state, to seeing much more vividly than a normal remembrance (although never to be mistaken for full eyes open vivality) some quite strange stuff.

Floaters yeah...got heaps of em....
i got 95% of mine on one night when i was about 10 or 12 years old...
my parents were driving at night on the way to our holidays and the next morning the streaks and spots of dozens of sets of oncoming headlights were permanently etched into my retinas.... i have many of them to this day...and before then i had only a few that i never noticed...
now i have a veritable "star field"... although the brain does tend to get fairly good at ignoring them...i still get fooled occasionally and think for a second something is moving or there is an insect flying ETC then only to realise...not....

anyway....I think what i see (or have seen) with my eyes shut is a very long story LOL....

I have seen things and I do not known why I have seen bright blue to white light that has woke me up in the middle of the night in a completely dark room.

Must not be completely dark if there is a bright blue to white light. Just kidding. ;)) Maybe its an alien abduction in progress. ;)) All joking aside, that sounds weird.

I know that the people out there do not believe me. I would not believe it if I was not seeing it myself. I have been told that I do have PVD in both eyes and that I have a lot of floaters. It is like looking through two snow globes without the snow but large pieces of my inner eyes and blood. What I see when I close my eyes is interesting and Scarry. Tonight is another night and tomorrow is another day.

I had an eye doctor appointment on Tuesday and I took my sketch book with me and it has drawings of what I see when O close my eyes and the lights that wake me up in the middle of the night and in the early morning hours. The doctors laughed at my drawings and said it was impossible what I was seeing. No one believe me but my wife, a few family members, and a few coworkers. I know what I see and the colors I see.

Gene could you make a graphic or an animation of what you see and post it here?

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Originally Posted by steve.ledger

If I've had a very long day and not gone to sleep when I needed it, I see wonderful moving cloudy shapes from which I can make out all sorts of pictures :D;

Attachment 63021

What do you see?

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erm I see someones teeth...he'eh