What do you see when you rub your eyes?

[The Ethos]

This is something I've always wondered. Is there a theme or motif that everyone seems to see?

Just to standardize... Close your eyes, cover them with your fingers, and give a little rub.
Yes, it feels good. Not too hard, wouldn't want to scratch anything.

Now, look.

What do you see? Please be realistic, no "Hitler juggling beercans" (Unless that is truly what you see)
I'm not asking what you visualize, but what do you SEE...shapes? patterns? Anything?

/Genuinely curious

[reishka]

I see little tiny alternating black and yellow squares. They're not symmetrical, and seem to follow the contours of some invisible shape.. seems to be circles. (Kind of think of those optical illusions of circles made with blue and yellow squares inside them).

If I push harder, I get little yellow sparklies as another layer.

[pollywog]

Hitler juggling beercans

I get Stalin.

But more seriously, I get flashes of black and red, but I really have to rub till it hurts to get even the slightest reaction. The flashes are me pressing on my eyeballs pretty damn hard. Anything less that that and I just get fuzzy vision.

[elminster]

I see little tiny alternating black and yellow squares. They're not symmetrical, and seem to follow the contours of some invisible shape.. seems to be circles. (Kind of think of those optical illusions of circles made with blue and yellow squares inside them).

If I push harder, I get little yellow sparklies as another layer.

Very much the same, except black and white.

I love getting the yellow sparkles ("Seeing stars"), although It rarely seems to happen and I'd prefer not repeatedly attempting it as my vision is getting worse as it is.

Sometimes, I seen a yellow/orange slightly fuzzy doughnut shape, but the weird thing about it is that it's one of the few things that seem to physically exist pure from just looking at it (Only when I really focus on it though). At times it's as if it's just as real and solid as any real world object.

[Nyarlathotep]

Darker purple.

[WraithXt1]

For me it almost looks like the "snow" you get when your TV doesnt get a signal. Strange.

[Shadow Tyrant]

For me it almost looks like the "snow" you get when your TV doesnt get a signal. Strange.

Much like this, except mine are more abstract and defined shapes than just little specks. And if I stare long enough, they start to make patterns and warp. Kinda like the visualizers for iTunes, WMP, etc.

[Rat]

nothing(edit:at the moment)... blur... maybe it's the lighting... or the drugs....

i catch your drift though

sometimes i like to watch the little dots "float away"...

i like that it draws my attention towards it and makes me turn my head even though it's in my eyes and if i dont move my head it stays in the same spot

[Verator]

Well, if I keep my eyes closed and concentrate on the weird things, I get little skulls and amorphous mutating 3d shapes floating around.

[Anpheus]

If I close my eyes very tightly, clench them as closed as I can, I see fractal like images that expand, shift, and change color. Sometimes they are simple alternating patterns, sometimes intricate. Sometimes cloudy and hard to see, as if he primary colors were amorphous entities fighting for dominance.

[SecondTalon]

Geometric squares with various designs in them, somewhat reminiscent of viewing farmland from an airplane. Checkerboard patterns as well. All of it rotating both counter-clockwise and clockwise. Two overlays, basically, so I'm going to assume that each eye is doing it's own thing.

[chaosspawn]

If I press in one area I'll get a little black spot with a thin yellow outline on the other side of my eye. Resting with my palms hitting my eyes gives a strange landscape of thin shifting black shapes against a dark green or red background. Also white lines stretch from the outer edges pointing towards the center.

[Nexus_1101]

The best way to discribe it is gray sploges

[Alpha Omicron]

purplish-green hexagons.
I've always been interested in this. Your eyes sending fake signals to your brian: Why?

Edit: I get the doughnut too.

[PatrickRsGhost]

At first it looks like a black and white (or grey) checkered pattern, but it's not as well-defined as a checkerboard or the checkered pattern usually associated with the description. It's almost like an Escher drawing inside my eyeballs.

If I hold it for a bit longer, I see the "sparklies" someone else described, and sometimes they form into the glowing doughnut. If I open my eyes, I see the doughnut for at least another 10 minutes or so.

[joeframbach]

If I close my eyes very tightly, clench them as closed as I can, I see fractal like images that expand, shift, and change color. Sometimes they are simple alternating patterns, sometimes intricate. Sometimes cloudy and hard to see, as if he primary colors were amorphous entities fighting for dominance.

Bingo. That's it.

[Savoy_Truffle]

I get this weird circle of purple flash before disappearing under a tan attack of what looks like they could be checkerboards except that they're rounded in a strange way (think checkerboards stretched over spheres) and everything's moving. Also, when I open my eyes again, I'm temporarily blind, so probably don't want to mess around too much ^^x.

[sarahnade]

Two fuzzy circles (one for each eye) that are anywhere from burnt orange to dark green to black. Behind them is the "TV snow" like someone described. But it's not black and white, it's very muted. None of the colors are vivid unless I'm pushing really hard. And in front of everything may be a sparkle or two floating around, or maybe a streak of light.

[d3adf001]

i normally see black with yellow fractals that some in and spiral if i press a little bit they change to green and blue and are slightly different fractals. its really fun to do but i dont do it often because i think it might be bad for my eyes

[Prole]

At first it looks like a black and white (or grey) checkered pattern, but it's not as well-defined as a checkerboard or the checkered pattern usually associated with the description. It's almost like an Escher drawing inside my eyeballs.

If I hold it for a bit longer, I see the "sparklies" someone else described, and sometimes they form into the glowing doughnut. If I open my eyes, I see the doughnut for at least another 10 minutes or so.

I get the same. Black and white checks, melding into colour sometimes.

[b.i.o]

I tried twice to test this out. The first I just got random dark colors in quick succession. The second I saw a repeating diamond pattern where all the diamonds were outlined by a dull yellow color and everything else was black/dark purple.

[thecommabandit]

Well, I've just been doing that for two minutes and I can barely see what I'm typing because of the swirly yellow squares.

First it's like some yellow swirly stuff, then it all clears away from the middle in a (very) vaguely circular shape to reveal a bunch of multi-coloured points of light that kinda... flash. They don't exactly flash as in disappear for a time, but flashing is the closest word I have. Then a bunch of yellow and black squares build inwards towards the centre, but if I move my eyes they middle bit turns into the first yellow swirly stuff. If I can hold my eyes in place long enough, the squares completely fill up my vision, and there's occasionally a huge, slow-moving ripple that travels across it. I know this quite well since when I was little I always used to do it because it looked cool. I'd jam the heels of my hands into my eyes and wait for the swirlies. Only annoying thing was that in primary school, if you have your eyes closed and your hands on them it often means you're crying, which got me a lot of "What's wrong?"s from other people. Damn people, I'm trying to trip out here! Go away!

As another interesting fact, if I close one eye, look at my nose with my open one and push my finger onto the tear duct area of my closed eye, a black circle with a fire-like orangey red rim appears on the very edge of my field of view.




I find it very interesting that yellow squares is the general consensus, which kinda implies its some in-built side-effect of uniform pressure on the eyes. Mis-firing optic nerves perhaps?

[Metty]

For me it almost looks like the "snow" you get when your TV doesnt get a signal. Strange.

I get something similar. A sort of static.

Then out of the middle of this static comes a black and yellow vibrating thing that slowly creeps closer until I can't focus on it and then it moves back and creeps forwards again. After a while everything fades to a brilliant white and then back to the static and the black and yellow vibrating thing.

I used to see that black and yellow vibrating thing and a hear a steady drum beat (which I assume was my heart) when I was younger at night when my room was dark and quiet.

Used to scare the shit out of me.

[Anpheus]

Two fuzzy circles (one for each eye) that are anywhere from burnt orange to dark green to black. Behind them is the "TV snow" like someone described. But it's not black and white, it's very muted. None of the colors are vivid unless I'm pushing really hard. And in front of everything may be a sparkle or two floating around, or maybe a streak of light.

Ah, so we are talking about two distinct phenomena here. When you press down on your eye, that occurs to me as well. When you clench your eyes, it appears at least one other person agrees on what I described.

Pressing down on the corner of my eye has always caused a dark colored region with a fuzzy and indestinct interior, the size of which is directly proportional to the pressure and direction it is coming from. (Do not, I repeat, do not carry out experiments with anything more than a light touch with sanitized fingers, you risk serious damage to your eyes, they are extremely sensitive!)

[Mmmm, Pi]

Dark green background with black splodges on it, moving around.

[Number3Pencils]

Nothing consistent, apparently. I clenched my eyes once and got a checkerboard with a hole burned into it (think of projectors burning film). The second try, I got brief green blobs and then just black.

[Kalessin]

I've gotten the checkerboards since.. hmm, I can remember back to about age 5. They're folded, twisted and moving, but with very distinct black-and-white checkerboard patterns, and eventually they fade out into static or dark colors. And, just like PatrickRsGhost, it's all very Escher-like...

[Insignificant Deifaction]

A whole host of patterns in concentric circles that slowly fade towards the periphery. Strongly present are overlapping multicolored squares, and spiral fractals.

[Puzzlemaker]

Yo Momma.

*cough*

Really though, colored dots. That move.

[Klye]

I think it depends what I have previously been looking at.

The first time I tried I saw a green diamond with a yellow circle in it, the next time a slowly contracting circle made up of smaller blue circles. Interesting.

[curious and questioning]

I see boring things.
When I gently close my eyes, since I'm in a lighted room, I see orangish blur. When I rub my eyes after that, I see black splotches take over my vision, but I can correlate them to where my fingers are. If I press hard, the blurriness turns into yellowish sparks in places near where I rub, though.
When I close my eyes as tight as I can, I see black, with faint yellow lines. When I rub my eyes after that, I see ghostly gray bits near the center at one point, then just black, and if it stays at just black for too long it turns into very dark orange, almost mixed with purple.

I remember seeing all these psychedelic colored patterns when I would close and rub my eyes when I was little. I wonder what happened.

[Numquam]

First I see little red dots scattered around my field of view, and then a huge wave of purple rolled in from the left, which faded into a greenish color and is now a purple spot in the middle of my face after I opened my eyes and am now typing this. Weird?

[MrHackman]

sort of like static on a tv, but alot more black, and the white is actually mostly multicolored, but really light. If I push in a certain dierection ona given eye, the colors tend to be around the same color.
And now my eyes are starting to hurt from pushing on them.

[bluebambue]

this is cool, I thought all people saw the same thing

I see yellowy orange donuts that someone else discribed.

On a side note, when I nearly faint my vision becomes very yellow and hexagony.

[Ashbash]

If I do the above I get random little squiggles which move when i move my eyes, as if they were affected by some unique gravity. However when I clench my eyes shut and open them I get a black background with lots of red, blue and green dots that randomly appear and disappear in different places for a few seconds.

Interesting... I've never seen coloured shapes like a lot of people are describing...

[xooll]

bright, yellowish-greenish dots appear and form vague shapes, more reddish around the edges. Harder rubbing reveals a ring of yellow with the reddish edges.

More interesting is the patterns I get seemingly at random, noticable only when my eyes are closed. It starts looking like black and white puzzle pieces, but then these fade to reveal what looks like a contour map of some kind, drawn in the same yellowish-greenish mentioned above, which then is replaced by a gridlike pattern with each spot filled by a tight little yellowish-greenish spiral.

[Twasbrillig]

I see phosphenes. Simple as that.

[Memo]

When I close my eyes and rub them I can see vast stone surfaces – surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth. An abnormal, non-Euclidean place, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.

[The Mighty Thesaurus]

I don't see anything.

[Gelsamel]

I'm not sure if you're doing it right.

I see what you see if you rub LCD screens (like on your calculator) except inside my eyes.