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Bright Flashes Of Light!

You've actually reminded me I did have flashing lights in one of my eyes at work about 10 years ago. It started like a sort of shimmering in one corner, then spread across my whole eye. I couldn't concentrate at all, just a constant pulsating, flashing, glitchy shimmering of light. Kind of like being on acid (if you've ever done that - I did a couple of times in my youth).

I made up some excuse and went for a walk, hoping it would disappear (it did, after about half an hour). I was *very* stressed out in work at the time, and always put the experience down to stress.

As I say, this was about 10 years ago and I didn't experience anything else in the meantime. This recent one in the caravan was completely different. Just a single instantaneous blast of white light that woke me up.

https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/ocular-migraine.htm Could be a migraine -extremely freaky if you've never had one before.
 
Hi everyone, I used to post on these forums as Soul_Doubt but it doesn't seem to be possible to reactivate my old account *EDIT* - a very kind mod has merged my accounts!

Anyway, I wanted to log in to post on the glitch in the matrix reddit thread but as I was waiting for my new account to be activated I happened across this thread.

The same thing happened to me a few months back in our caravan. I was woken up by a monumentally intense bright flash of light. It was like a nuclear bomb going off right in my face for a split second and almost accompanied by a silent "boom", if that makes sense.

I was suddenly wide awake and vaguely pulled the curtains back by my bed. Nothing. Silence. The caravan park is *very* quiet with lots of rules and security - that's why we picked it.

I didn't have any after effects - no "purple haze", or anything like that.

I put my head back down and went back to sleep pretty quickly. I didn't think of the experience as being paranormal or anything - just a bit strange. Probably hypnagogic (though it woke me up - I was fast asleep - and I've never experienced any sleep disorders before or since).

It did make a big enough impression on me to remember it when I woke up "properly" in the morning. I told my wife about it and asked if she'd noticed anything (she hadn't).

Didn't think anything more of it until I was listening to The Unexplained With Howard Hughes podcast (an excellent podcast by the way) a few weeks back at the start of this lockdown.

He was interviewing an American guy who documents UFO sightings. Howard asked him whether there were any recent trends in phenomena and the interviewee said they'd received a wave of reports of people being woken up from their sleep in recent months by blinding flashes of light.

Weird!!

Thanks for reading.

Sounds like exploding head syndrome which can be accompanied by a flash of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/exploding-head-syndrome-hypnagogic-noise-s.115/
 
This recent one in the caravan was completely different. Just a single instantaneous blast of white light that woke me up.
(I think we as a forum discussed what I'm about to re-outline: yes, I'm sure we did...?)

(EDIT - thanks @Naughty_Felid )

Yes....In addition to my upthread major physical experience, there appears to be an idiopathic hypnagogic 'endoflash' we seem to neurogenerate inside our own optic nerves by over-blinking in the dark whilst nearly asleep in hyper-reaction to a half-perceived sound or other stimulus.

I postulate that this may be a major cranial or trigeminal nerve cluster that becomes squeezed by a global grimace in the dark, that gets 'seen' by an optical processing system that's triggered into survival-mode instinctive reaction but has no standard baseline content to process. So you 'see' a flash inside your own eye:brain, and it is very bright (if you are already on-edge, this is more common, and may be all-too-familiar.....conversely, if you're a mellowed/centred/relaxed soul who worries not a jot, you may say "what?!?")
 

Again, thanks. It was interesting reading the thread and the links that people gave. I'm sure you're right with the occular migraine explanation for the thing I had at work (though I never thought that experience was "fortean" - I just mentioned it in relation to what the other poster said).

As for EHS for the more recent one, in the caravan, I'm not sure. In the wikipedia article, it's represented like a flash bulb on the corner of a darkened room. This was an all consuming light. There was no sound accompaniment (in the original post I said it was almost like a "silent" boom of light) or ringing in my ears afterwards, or pain. Unlike the occular migraine in work, I definitely wasn't stressed or any of the other triggers posited to bring on EHS. I haven't experienced anything like it, before or since, while folk on here talking about EHS seem to have it fairly regularly. Lastly, what I read there seems to say EHS occurs when you're falling asleep or waking up. This flash of light woke me up, at an unnatural time.

However, *all of that said*, even if it wasn't EHS, I suspect it was something very similar
 
(I think we as a forum discussed what I'm about to re-outline: yes, I'm sure we did...?)

(EDIT - thanks @Naughty_Felid )

Yes....In addition to my upthread major physical experience, there appears to be an idiopathic hypnagogic 'endoflash' we seem to neurogenerate inside our own optic nerves by over-blinking in the dark whilst nearly asleep in hyper-reaction to a half-perceived sound or other stimulus.

I postulate that this may be a major cranial or trigeminal nerve cluster that becomes squeezed by a global grimace in the dark, that gets 'seen' by an optical processing system that's triggered into survival-mode instinctive reaction but has no standard baseline content to process. So you 'see' a flash inside your own eye:brain, and it is very bright (if you are already on-edge, this is more common, and may be all-too-familiar.....conversely, if you're a mellowed/centred/relaxed soul who worries not a jot, you may say "what?!?")

This sounds about right. I do think on balance that this flash of light was far more likely to have originated from my own mind than from any external source.

Still, interesting that the UFO guy is getting a surge in reports of this phenomenon in recent months (even though, as I say, I do not think my own experience was UFO related in any way!)

I read your experience of the bright light while driving in the thread you linked. That sounds utterly terrifying!!
 
I experienced flashing lights in my vision. As it just seemed to be in the right eye, I took the precaution of going straight to Specsavers for a check up and they referred me immediately to the eye hospital. Turned out I had a detached retina. So often, there’s a reasonable explanation for flashing lights and I STRONGLY recommend an eye test as soon as possible.

Yes. There’s nothing like having needles stuck in your eye on a Saturday afternoon and then being made to watch Ant and Dec on the TV from your bed.
BUT... Specsavers and the local NHS eye hospital were absolutely briiliant. Can’t wait to have the other one done now. Honestly, once you’ve gone through a mild anaesthetic and needles and other fine surgical tools stuck into your eye while you’re still watching it, everything else hospital-related is a doddle.
 
Soul_Doubt, dittos on the migraine-aura vision stuff. I never get aura when I'm actually going to have a headache, but I've had it several times throughout the years. Twice it seemed to be induced by the sharp lights that certain stores have, but two or three times now I've experienced it randomly at home. Definitely a wild experience, and not always the same-- the first couple of times it was a sort of spiraling JPEG-distortion of light, and more recently it's been "things are light and blurry and almost have trails".
Flashes I don't quite know about. I've seen bright blue flashes at night once before, but I don't know that it wasn't a transformer blowing somewhere distant.
 
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