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Yesterday, I was sitting with a really bright computer screen (brighter than usual) right in front of me (about 30 cm) and it was like a cubicle (most of the light was blocked from all 3 sides — front, left and right). Only some light was coming from behind.

I was wearing rimless specs (lens: cylindrical -0.5) with its left temple (thing that is connected to the lens and goes behind your ear) broken, so the specs were not parallel to my eyes (perpendicular distance between left lens and my left eye was more than distance between right lens and right eye).

I saw two green circles vertically on top of each other (upper one was sharper and brighter; also it was green — maybe because of blue ray filters on lens), a little left to my left eye. There was a black spot in the middle of the circle(it was shaped like a molecular orbital formed by two 1s orbitals). I could see floater-like things (smaller than the floaters I usually see) in the circle. I think it was the image of the inside of my eye, because while I was closing my left eye, I could see the shadows of my eyelids and eyelashes covering the circle. In addition, when I was moving my head, the circle was also moving. I think the black spot was the blind spot in the eye.

I think of two things:

  1. The light from behind me reflected from the lens and went in my eye and then the reflected light ray coming from the inside of my eye formed an image by the lens.

  2. The light in front of me went in my eye (and inside of my eye is now bright), and I saw the image of my bright eye, formed by the lens, in front of me.

I don't know if it is a common phenomenon, please answer if you know the explanation.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you tasking about floaters? $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Commented Sep 30, 2021 at 19:34
  • $\begingroup$ I have the same experience if there is any small orbs of light that is reflected light only, if I sleep with my watch close to my face, rain drops on a window, diamond ring held up to my eye. I can also see the surface on my lens, waves of moisture as my lids close and open, shadow of my eyelashes, and smaller particles moving around as I blink, even a weird little creature possibly bacteria?? No one I explain this phenomenon to knows how to do this. I’ve tried to explain how to do it but so far you are the only person besides myself that can do this. $\endgroup$
    – Kat
    Commented Oct 3 at 13:54

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The answer is "yes". I haven't had your exact experience, but when I am getting an eye exam and the eye doctor uses a bright light and a magnifying lens to look at my retinas, I can see the image of the blood vessels on each retina, either from the internal reflections inside my eye, or reflections off of the magnifying lens.

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  • $\begingroup$ Note that the blood vessels are before the photo-sensitive cells in vertebrate eyes (octopuses have more sensibly arranged eyes for that matter). So they are always in the image you see and removed by neural post-filtering. At least for me it is possible to trick that post-filtering by quickly moving a slit (e.g. the gap between two fingers) directly before the eye while looking at a bright surface – this allows me to see the fine blood vessels as fine dark lines in my field of view. Not sure what you see during the eye exams, but I could imagine that it is a similar effect. $\endgroup$
    – Sebastian Riese
    Commented Nov 1, 2023 at 12:43

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