What do you see when you close your eyes.
 

I'm guessing the intial reaction by basically all of you would be Gee, duh, what else? BLACK!

But let's take a step back and examine if the color of pitch black is what we really see. When I close my eyes right at this moment, the last lighted object that produces or reflect light, such as my LCD monitor the recessed lighting on my ceiling gets captured right into the rods/cones in the back of my eyeball (mind you, I'm no expert in the mysteries of the human eye), it makes a splash of "light" that almost forms a degrading circle, slowly shrinking, then is quickly followed by little "fuzzies" that scurry around.

So, here's an experiement, try these several tests with the following conditions and tell me what you find.

1) Close your eyes right now for 30 seconds and tell me what you "see".

2) Turn off all your lights, and try to make the room as pitch black as possible. If you have to wait till nighttime in your washroom or bedroom with the lights killed, that's fine. Keep your eyes open and "see" what you can "see" without the prescence of light.

3) Follow step 2, but this time close your eyes completely. Again, tell me what you see.

As my calling in life is to be most likely an accountant, not a optometrist, would any of you who may have studied biology, or even health sciences (good luck, considering this is a gaming forum and all), is there any explanation of why your eye has these "white spots" that you "see" when your eyes are shut, or when you are in a pitch black room? Is it because of the absence of light, your pupil dilates to as big as possible, and whatever is lacking that the light cannot sufficiently produce, it is "blanked" out by the white fuzzies? Yeah, this sounds like a pretty silly thing to do, but I'd never really given it much thought until I was just trying to get to bed just now. Man, the things you do when you're bored trying to get to sleep. =/

lol, Spatty seems like the person you see at school sitting around following the dust move on his eyes wondering about it :P.
























no, I have no real answer :(.

1) Yes, I am that kind of person.

2) Is dat sum Haibane Renmei wannabe.

3) Is it that hard to close your eyes for 30 seconds and tell me what you "see"? :(

<3 Greykin.

When I was a little kid, I thought I might have special powers because I saw all sorts of shapes and colors when I closed my eyes.

I used to close my eyes and press on my eyeballs to see all the trippy colors. I also used to stare at the sun.

Might explain why I have to wear cokebottles to see.

I used to close my eyes and "explore" during study hall. I always saw some trippy stuff, sometimes like the Sonic 3-D landscapes on the old Sega. It was like I was floating through some trippy outer space thing. Good times.

Floating fuzzies can be annoying. I get flashing sometimes, which is really obnoxious when I want to like... sleep.

Something I learned is that is you stare at something for about... 30 seconds I guess, when you close your eyes you'll see a rough image of whatever that was with the complimentary colors. So something that's green should look red.

Fun stuff.

Here's something trippy to try that doesn't involve closing your eyes. Get your computer showing something generally white and then wave your hand or hands quickly back and forth, and you'll observe to your amazement the trails your fingers make: creating the illusion of more than 5 fingers.

Good way to stimulate closed eye hallucinations is to press your eyes into your arm or something, apply a little force to a part of your eye. I usually see floating masses of triangles and discordant dots of colors, sometimes it'll stay at one color and change to another periodically.

On the topic of kinda weird things to do with yourself. My friend told me that if you take the eraser side of a pencil... and rub a part of your eyeball over your eyelid, you can find a kind of euphoric spot. It's a strange sensation. Ah, I found it. Yeah, use the eraser side of a pencil, like a point of the eraser and try rubbing around the upper left of your right eye (your actual eyeball, with the eyelid over it) or upper right of your left eye (presumably.) You don't need to rub hard, just a slight circular motion.

Immediately after closing my eyes, I see a purpleish-pink afterimage that fades completely in about 10 seconds. After that it is a mostly very dark, dull red color, from the ambient light shining through my eyelids' blood vessels.

Mostly image noise, very similar to high ISO noise in a digital camera, only moving. Also occasional spotches of dull color.

Same.

I don't really know how to describe what I see..or what I don't see. I guess kind of a settling blackness as my pupils change. But when I close your eyes, my other senses become much stronger.

Blackness with some swirling patches of red and flesh-colour. Also the afterimage of whatever I last looked at!

For the first few seconds, I see black, but due to all the florecent lights in my work place, I see mostly red.

It's called phosphene. It's really fun to play with.

That being said, I usually see orange lightning.

pencil
 

i see a pencil every time i close my eyes, because 4 years ago now, my religious, moral and philosophical studies teacher told me that to meditate properely and train your mind you have to hold an image in your head for a really long time without it changing at all :juggler: and i thought of a pencil. I keep trying and so far i can hold it there for 10 seconds, and then it turns into my mother's head, but that's another story, bloody brilliant.:edgarrock:

1) Close your eyes right now for 30 seconds and tell me what you "see".
It was black, but I could "see" the aura of light from my lamp, this faded after a while, and then all I could see then was darkness.

2) Turn off all your lights, and try to make the room as pitch black as possible. If you have to wait till night-time in your wash room or bedroom with the lights killed, that's fine. Keep your eyes open and "see" what you can "see" without the presence of light. If that still doesn't work, try using a blind fold or cover your eyes with a thick cloth.
I guess all I can describe it as is white noise.

3) Follow step 2, but this time close your eyes completely. Again, tell me what you see.
Same as step 2.

Usually, when I am really tired, blobs of greenish stuff move at me. Kinda fun, kinda creepy. Usually, when I have a headache, when I close my eyes, it is sometimes like looking at snow on a TV screen. Not a lot of it, but some.

It's just retinal noise, really. Your photoreceptors, ganglion cells, etc are pretty prone to spontaneous activity. It's only when you cut off normal input that the noise becomes noticeable. Phosphenes are what happens when the noise is amplified (by mechanical stimuli or otherwise). Then again it's important to note that what you perceive does not necessarily correspond to receptor stimulation, since your brain slaps on a healthy amount of processing.

This might make for good reading:
http://www.jgp.org/cgi/content/full/125/6/641

So, from my well-lit office without a window, I close my eyes and see...

Orange. Sure, it's my favorite color, but I close my eyes and I see a sea of orange-ness. And in this orange backdrop are oddly shaped dark spots or shadows floating around, disappearing when I try to focus on them and coming into view when I don't. Closed for about a minute now, it feels like I'm moving forward through it, and these spots are gliding by my side as new ones emerge. So now it looks like some kind of warp hole a la Sliders style or something. *opens eyes*

Yeah, I always get that when I close my eyes. Just never wrote it down before like that. :p

Ah, thank you very much Bigblah for that. Yeah, I thought it was basically something that the retinals didn't have ample light to be activated, therefore would fill in these lack of stimulus with just blanks - or the "white noise". Actually, after opening and closing my eyes for extended periods of time, say about 2 minutes, this noise does stay around even when I open my eyes. I can see litte patches of the noise even if my eyes are working nominally with the eyelids open.

Also, I changed step two to not include using a blindfold. How the hell is someone supposed to keep their eyes open and have a blind fold wrapped tightly around them. So basically keep your eyes open in pitch black environment.

I see a wide variety of constantly shifting colors and shapes, no matter what the conditions. They do not appear to correspond with any of the lighting I see when my eyes are open.

If I close my eyes for thirty seconds now, it's just colourful imprints of all of the light-emitting or reflecting objects around me fading gently. In the dark, it's just pretty much black. If I keep my eyes open in the pitch dark it's the same. Sometimes with both of these my imagination seems to give me images of what I imagine is around me. I used to test this kind of thing a lot, I don't know why.

I used to do this as a kid; first it would be a bunch of black, white and grey dots, then they would form a sort of tunnel and it was like I was going down it until I saw green, red and blue sparkles in blackness like multicoloured stars. Then I think my imagination took over because I remember seeing actual pictures, for instance I saw a candle burning in a grate in a castle. West stuff =s.

Actually, I find that happens a lot as well. Your brains starts filling the pitch black void with mental images, whether your eyes are closed or you are in a pitch black environment, however when I eye lids are shut, it seems that the images projected from the brain are much stronger, like a person's face, a landscape, an artwork etc.

While I did not follow the guidelines of the experiment, at random and very rare occassions, I'll see "worms" or whatever crawling (they're not really worms obviously) and I try to follow them but they all disperse when I do so. I don't know how to explain that in more sensible terms :S

I also like to look towards a bright sun with closed eyes to get the reddish tint which clearly differentiates from if you were to close your eyes in a less illuminated area.

maybe i'm doing this wrong but i just get a black, slightly brown colored blurr. hard to describe

When I close my eyes it seems as if wizzing black lights are flying by my head.