Visual anomalies

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I have the 'bugs', definitely. (Hmmm... I should have mentioned them on my thread, too.) I have quite bad floaters, but the bugs are different; I see them at a point in vision between floaters and where you see an object you're looking at. They're very bright and remind me of looking at a pond full of teeny tiny little fish wriggling about. I can see them better if I look at a bright background like the sky.

Cyberpunkwriter is quite right about the first two. They sound like Mearles-Irlen syndrome / scotopic sensitivity. This might be a good start page, with a reasonable range of links:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/

I did a rough survey here, which seemed to indicate a higher incidence of visual stress in the AS community than the population at large. Possibly another manifestation of sensitivity.

The bugs, if I'm interpreting them correctly, can also be seen quite broadly as a swirling star-field effect. They are down to a change in blood-pressure. Typically a sudden change in posture, or strain such in picking up an dropping a heavy load.

And the cats do accord with classic fatigue/exhaustion symptoms.

Chris (Optometrist)

LOL I get that too (and a fair few other visual oddities). Strangely enough when we actually had a mouse in the building I was the only one utterly oblivious to the little sod!

I have floaters and get the star/bugs quite often. I think I must rapidly change blood pressure too often or something

I get the bugs and the cats. It is nice to get an explanation, thanks emettman and dandelion. I also have the "dustbugs" but they are different from the others. I think of the bloodpressure bugs as "tiny yins and yangs", I have low bloodpressure, could be linked to that.
I have cats, had them all my life too, could explain why we see the shadows as such. When I see it I think it's one of the cats I had who died and is living as a ghost with me.

(Please, stick around and don't be shy, DirtDawg and KayGee. I hope to see more messages from both of you.)





A couple years ago, I started getting enough of the floaters and bugs that I finally broke down and asked my optometrist about it the last time he checked out my eyes, since he didn't mention seing anything strange in my eyes. (I really worried myself, because some of the floaters literally looked like crawling worms and scurrying bugs.)

He just chuckled, and told me I have nothing to worry about - I'll start noticing it more and more as I get older, but it's nothing to worry about. Being the way I am, I wouldn't let him go that easy - I wanted to know exactly what they were and what was causing it, because I don't like not knowing the mechanical details of such things.

He explained that what it was was the tissue that my eyes are made of will naturally shed off dead cells, kind of like the way skin will flake off. It just gets replaced with new cells. Unlike skin, the material in our eyes doesn't just drop off onto the floor - it floats in the fluid inside your eyes, until it eventually breaks down and gets cycled into the eye's blood vessels and filtered out of the blood.

He told me that as my eyes get older, more of those cells will slough off, and they won't get filtered out of my eyes as quickly, and so I'll see more of them longer than I did when I was younger. Also, he said it would be normal for everything I see to start taking on a slightly yellowish tint. I haven't noticed that, but I guess it's something to look forward to, along with more squirming worms and scurrying bugs

Worms? I asked. The optometrist said that some of the cells are like little fibers that are constantly moving in your eyes, and it's those that actually help to move the other material around. They will slough off just like any other cells in there, and would look like hairs or worms.

So, now you have it second-hand from an optometrist, confirming what a couple others have said: you're probably seeing debris and fibers floating around in the fluid in your eyeballs, and that's probably normal and nothing to worry about.





Now, when I close my eyes, I dimly see something like a dough-nut or ring made of flashing and pulsating blue, green, red, and purple light, which seems to slowly be moving closer and closer without ever getting noticibly bigger. It seems to slowly turn or flow like a jellyfish in slow motion. I noticed when I was a little kid that when I press on my eyeballs through my eyelids, I could see it more clearly, and I spend a good long time, maybe even hours, pressing on my eyeballs like that to watch that ring-shape. (It's a wonder I didn't go blind from all that abuse I subjected my eyes to like that!) It is something like seeing stars, but not quite the same; close enough to be related, though. I suppose that was just a trick that pressure plays on the optic nerves, and it could be the same thing as the swirling funnel-clouds someone mentioned. The difference between this and floaters is that the floaters look like real objects, while this looks like unnatural and impossible lights or flashes; the floaters I see in bright light, the lights I'll see when everything else looks dark, like when my eyes are closed (although when I hit my head once as a kid and saw stars, everything else seemed to go dim for a second, and those "stars" showed up in brilliant sheets of lights like waterfalls of brilliant electrical colour transposed over each other.) The floaters are almost certainly real objects, while the lights and colours are only trick images produced by the optic nerves under stress.



And, when I stay up way too late, I do see what looks like cats racing around me at high speed, and sometimes things that look like bugs crawling on the ceiling at the edge of my vision, but I'm pretty sure that's sleep-related hallucinations - yet again something completely different. (Hypnogoguic and hypnopompic hallucinations and I are old, old friends! We're all on a first-name basis these days, along with their pal, Sleep Paralysis, but that's a story I've already gone into, elsewhere.)

Yagaloth, that sent me back to my reference-books and the web just in case my first reaction was wrong! It appears to be a TERRIBLE description of the origin of floaters (Muscae volitantes) through vitreous degeneration, a normal age-related phenomenon. Cells do not significantly slough off inside the eye.

This, to me, is a much better account of floaters,
(but it may come under the category of "too much information"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

The one thing I would add is that any *sudden* *fresh* batch of floaters should be checked out professionally. 98% of such cases are harmless, 2% are the first indication of early retinal detachment.



NO. There is no such pump, especially fibre-powered, moving things around. The aqueous humor, which does have a transport function for oxygen and CO2, should not have cells in it. Detectable cells there is a marker of disease.



Now, YOU are right!

I have synesthesia, and see auras, occsionally black dots ("insects?) and see cats out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes when I look at things they will "shimmer" or "tremble." I also have severe symptoms of depersonalization (where nothing seems/ looks real, everything looks like a hallucination, not even my body feels, looks, or seems real). In fact before my son was dxed with AS and I recognized mysef in the criteria, I assumed I had a severe case of depersonalization disorder... the only other disorder besides AS I have been convinced I have (even when I was told other things were wrong with me).

Thanks for the wikipedia article....very interesting.I noticed that myopia was lited as a reason that children have floaters...I have astigmatism in both eyes, nearly blind with out glasses.I use to enjoy watching my floaters when I was a kid....they were kind of like friends...(I was a very lonly child...lol)

Yagaloth....I also use to press on my eyes to enjoy the noiseless fireworks show...I was warned not to do this but I still did on occasion(we didnt have psp2 when I was a kid...this was cheap entertainment when I was bored.)

I seem, then, to have remembered things a bit skewed, that was several years ago and I had a lot on my mind at the time. The link you posted seems to be pretty much what he said, although I seem to remember he said something about the floaters eventually breaking down, and eventually filtering out (or maybe he just said I should get used to them, learn how to ignore them, and they seem to go away?) I think the only thing I heard clearly, though, was that I didn't have to worry about a retinal tear or parasites, which were my concerns before I asked about it. Also I'm certain he said that everyone has them, and we will see more and more as we get older, and that they are basically just organic matter aging and breaking down and floating and sinking in the fluid that fills the insides of our eyes. By that point, I had gone past worry and relief, into fascination at the idea of what happens inside the eyes as they age, and where that stuff comes from and goes to, and I suppose I "went off into my own little world" at that point.

(To give an idea of what I was thinking as he said that and how badly they were annoying me, I tuned him out at several points, imagining getting rid of those stupid floaters fast by creating a crazy dialysis machine that pumps all the fluid out of my eyes and fills them up with fresh, clean stuff, and then I pictured everything that can go wrong with it, and kept getting recurring images of my eyes deflating like beach balls, and then I began to wonder what happens to the vitreous humour during eye surgery, and whether it gets replaced naturally if it all leaks out, and then remembering high school biology class where my teacher had a big jar of cow eyes in formaldehyde which we never got around to dissecting, and wishing I'd had a chance to dissect one so I knew what to expect... and then I thought about how I just lost my job and everything that went wrong leading up to it, and how I was going to pay for new glasses without any money, and at least I don't have to worry about having worms in my eyes or anything like that, and that maybe if I stood on my head and then stood up straight really quickly the indsides of my eyes would probably look like a pair of snow globes!, and that the crazy eye-dialysis machine would probably hurt like hell, but it sure would be nice to have a nice clean, pure goop in there, and why wouldn't our eyes have a natural self-cleaning mechanism?, and around and around....)




Krex, I had a brother and sister and no end of things to do, but there were times when just shutting everyone and everything else out and turning on the fireworks was far more relaxing and entertaining. I have to wear glasses now, I can barely see my hand in front of my face without them, and I do have to wonder if there's a connection (I mean, I wonder if I really have ruined my eyesight light that), but somehow I suspect that it was probably harmless and that my bad eyesight is more genetic than anything else (my mother went nearly blind from macular degeneration, her mother and grandfather had trouble seeing, and so on... I got rotten eyesight from my mother's side of the family, and my father's side seems to have a long history of strange behaviour that might be related to Asperger's, both sides have trouble with substance abuse, and here I am in the middle - at least, I didn't inherit trouble with alcoholism or drug addiction....)

More the latter. They tend to fade out with time, but we also tend to get more as we get older.



You are not a million miles off. There is a technique called "vitrectomy", but we have to be talking about a SERIOUSLY mucked-up vitreous before that is worth considering.

For the average humanly-flawed eye with a quota of floaters, however annoying, it's not a recommended procedure.

(Alas! Some other deranged maniac has already invented such a nightmarish device? I suppose I'll have to go back to the drawing board, and invent an even more diabolical creation!)

I think that then or now, if someone had told me "hey, we do have this ingenious eye-fluid-sucking machine - you're simply gonna love what it does to your eyes! Wanna give it a whirl???", then I would have thought about it for possibly a minute, and then thrown up my hands and said "no way!", and then hurried home, realising that those floaters really aren't so annoying, after all.

And I guess that was the effect that thinking about it then had, anyway: I ended up at the end of considering how it would work and what could go wrong, feeling completely satisfied that a few dopey floaters were really easy to live with.



To think, that there was a time when I actually wanted to think like "normal" people! Whatever screwy reasoning was at work at the time, it ultimately solved my easy-to-live-with-floater obsession instantly without a ghastly, expensive, unnecessary, and painful-sounding eye-sucking medical procedure

It also helps me to appreciate what excellent systems nature usually has of dealing with such things elsewhere in the body - it's usually easy to take it all for granted, since they work so quietly and effectively under normal circumstances.

Wow, I have the same thing! I always just hoped it was mental echolocalia (never mentioned it to my parents because my aunt had schizophrenia show up in college, which totally ruined her life and has made my mum especially paranoid about mental voices in her kids). Glad to know it's not just me!

I also have the occasional 'sudden motion in the corner of my eye' thing, but I never thought it was cats--I always automatically think 'dog' because that's the pet I've had since birth. Heh. Myopia would probably be the cause of mine, I think--I have a nasty case of nearsightedness.

Does anyone else see things like clear drops of...something sliding down their vision? I always just hoped I was seeing tears on my eyeball or something.

Sometimes I get the red/blue flashy thing while reading outside, not often though.

when i close my eyes sometimes i get this image of blackness with all little stars coming towards me, like i'm going at light speed through space. Like star wars. Kind of like a tunnel.

i don't see bugs, but i see transluscent little "floaters" if i squint and look at a bright surface. they float around in groups and are usually round but sometimes like a pile of worms.

The cats thing i definitely do! I often see things or shadows or imaginary movements and think its a cat! I have 2 cats, but i think this on vacation, in other people's, houses, etc. I think its just cause we're used to seeing them sneaking up on us everywhere.

http://www.allaboutvision.com/condition ... floats.htm

Anybody get the thing were words seem to bounce on the page?

Whenever I see that happen it makes me a little nauseous...

I think part of it is the fact they seem to bounce so much, make me feel like the room is spinning a little.
Also certian geometric shapes sometimes look like they are spinning...

Dunno what causes it exactly, but when it happens, it seems to happen alot...maybe the color has something to do with it.