Seeing Dots of Light

I was looking at the experience of seeing tiny dots of light because out of nowhere, I had that experience last night. I had never heard of it before. I got up to go to the restroom and as I entered I left the light off, and it looked as if I had stepped into one of the old style planetariums with thousands of stars very similar to the night sky, but with thousands of what appeared to be shooting stars. I see some people here have seen something similar, and I understand the desire to think you are seeing atomic particles, I thought the same thing. There is that feeling that that is what is beeing seen. However, this is based on representations of what subatomic particles look like thus it is likely an attempt to attach the closest thing we know to an unknown experience. I tried a few things last night to test what I was seeing as it was a persistent vision. I put on my glasses to see if the lights would come more into focus, they did. I closed my eyes to see if the vision persisted, it did not. I covered one eye while focusing on a stationary light the covered the other eye, not only did I see the same thing with each eye, the perception shifted as it would when changing eyes during monocular vision. when I first say it, I could not believe what I was seeing. I reached out to touch what I saw, but only touched the wall. There is the feeling of peering into the wall that was quite profound, but again, that seems more like the psyche attempting to make sense of something using all the information it has, and failing, is left with a sense of wonder.I should say I do not use alcohol or drugs, other than Dr. prescribed meds from time to time. I am not suffering from and illness or mental illness. And I must say that had I simply come across the reports here, I would have been very skeptical and would likely not believe someone who reported such an event. Having experienced this without ever hearing of it before, then finding others reporting a similar experience is compelling...at least to me. If you have any idea as to what this could be in the eye, I would love to hear it.
- Charles Bynum (age 52)
Colorado Springs, CO USA

Fortunately, a reader with expertise in optometry has just sent in what seems to be a nice description of how something like this works against a light background. () That explanation wouldn't exactly work with a dark background, but maybe something like it would. By the way, maybe it's just a symptom of answering too many of these questions, but I've recently started to occasionally see the same sort of thing you saw.

Mike W.

(published on 02/10/2015)