| A bit OT: I'm curious what, if anything, people here see when their eyes are closed while falling asleep. I usually see one of the following: 1. Just the brown/black of my eyelids, with some slight variations in darkness. 2. A blob of white light. It looks a lot like what you'd see if you were in a dark room with a sink full of water that is draining, and there was a drop of some glowing dye in the water which is circling the drain and expanding. 3. Gears, pistons, linkages, pulleys, wheels, etc forming elaborate moving mechanisms. I have no idea what the mechanisms are doing or if any of the mechanisms are sensible or even possible. I'm very much not mechanically inclined and so this is the most puzzling nighttime visualization to me. 4. Plants. I seem to be flying low over land with patches of grass, flowers, and trees. The scene is quite detailed, with individual leaves and blades of grass visible, and any gaps between things filled with things farther behind, giving a strong sense of 3D. 5. Animals. Unlike the plants of #4 that I see in a full environment if I see animals they are just kind of there against the brown/black background. Sometimes they are normal animals, and sometimes they are weird creatures that belong in science fiction or mythology. The animals often morph into other animals. |
This is a really interesting phenomenon. Elaborate machinescapes are present in a lot of psychedelic closed eye visuals. Its unusual because we typically don't have a lot of interaction with these things, yet there's this shared experience. I wonder if the experiences we have had seeing complex machinery in real life have embedded some primal response to them.
I commonly see blobs of light, but a particularly frequent recurring visualization is circus imagery. If I'm listening to music I seem to be more prone to seeing something like cardboard cutouts of the Beatles in their Sgt Pepper outfits sort of bouncing up and down moving off to the side.