A tree with fluffy white clouds on the ends of its branches!
Our brains try to make sense ...
To be precise: I woke up and looked out towards the bare branches of a plum tree. Beyond the tree was a pattern of fluffy white clouds and blue sky[1], so that what I saw was a spreading tree silhouette with clumps of cloud where, later in the year, masses of leaves and blossoms will appear. It seemed like a fruit tree with white blossoms, except without any leaves ... white cotton candy and other cliches came to mind, as I tried to figure out what I was seeing.
I have "poor eyesight". In between the capabilities of folks born with no eyesight, and folks whose eyesight is initially good but drifts later: my eyesight was always there, but has never been OK. I am an enthusiastic patron of ocular medicine and optical technology. But when my glasses or contacts are off ...
My first "vision" is one of the earliest moments I can remember. My father worked at UC Riverside and we were renting a house from "the Hallbergs" who were on sabbatical. Lying in my second floor bedroom, the only light coming from outside through curtains, I saw ... the inside of a transparent but glowing sphere that slowly circled my body, seemingly several feet away, slowly and inexorably turning ...
I tried to touch it (nope!), tried to make it stop (I could only make it skip backwards slightly). I didn't tell anyone; I hadn't yet learned that I could take my questions to Mom and she would say something unforgettable[2]. I just watched and marveled.
It's possible that I was seeing particles on the surface of my eye. (I also have floaters, but those[3] move differently, jogging up and down rather than progressing steadily across, as if I was inside a turning transparent globe.) The effect has never recurred quite that same way.
I have two favorite effects.
When my eyes are shut against an external light source, I can see material flowing rapidly in a branching capillary. It may be on the back wall of my eye socket or in my eyelid. I can't see the individual blood cells, just frantic movement constrained by narrow passages.
At night, automobile tail-lights are glowing red speckled starbursts. If I lower my eyelids halfway, I see my eyelashes come down and cut each starburst in half. The more tail-lights, the more glowing half-circles with eyelash patterns at the top!
Celebrity Sufferer: James Thurber had poor vision and interesting hallucinations; at times he may have been experiencing Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Try This At Home: Next time you're looking out at a line of traffic (and not driving, yourself), let your eyes blur, however you do that, so that the tail-lights are glowing circles, and then lower your eyelashes. You won't see exactly what I see but it'll be yours.
Notes:
[1] Cue Cate Blanchett's voice saying, "The world is changing..." As I write this, it's just as wrong that Portland OR has blue sky and fluffy clouds in January, as it is that the Eastern Seaboard is having a murderous snow storm.
[2] I grew up in a white-privileged family[4] where Dad was "away, working" and Mom took care of two kids, stealing time to make art. At the age of 47 she started creating art full time. Mom and I have made peace about some of her "explanations" and the rest were precisely accurate and extremely helpful.
[3] My largest floater so far has been a dark mass that hung around for a decade or more before it shrank to ignorable size. As it turned, its silhouette alternately suggested a Vietnam-era helicopter or a person on their knees, hunched over in prayer. In order to more smoothly co-exist with it, I named it Persis, after Dare Wright.
[4] In another chunk of memoir I deal with the vexed question of what class I was brought up in. Each of my parents was the first in their family with a college degree. Broadly, we were "middle class," back when there was such a thing.
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