There has been some discussion of people sometimes seeing a lighted area behind the eyelids.  It occurs to me that one would assume this is noticed as a change from their baseline experience.  So what is the baseline?  In a dark room with eyes closed, assuming you are not pressing your hands to your eyes to excite the nerves and assuming you aren't yet falling into sleep, what do you see normally?
-Eva

Complex moving colors. I never see darkness. I can even see them in full daylight with eyes open but they are not as predominant. I have been this way as long as I can remember.

Sometimes they look like just static, like an old color TV not on a channel.

Sometimes they organize into swirls and swirling them is easy.

Sometimes they organize by color, such as red, blue, violet, green.

Sometimes they organized into more complex, regular patterns, geometric shapes, very intricate designs, images, repeated patterns of regular images, and other very intricate moving patterns.

When I don't have a candle handy and I want to do kasina practice I just take an eyelid color and/or image and amplify it and use that as the basis of a kasina and go from there.

Geometic shapes!  That would be a trip.  I only saw such a thing once when I had a really nasty flu and fever, I could see octagons that would form and break apart.  Most of the time it's just white static and/or swirling colors for me, the same thing I see in a pitch black room. 

-Eva  

This is an interesting topic.

I see static eyes open and occasionally tiny black hole looking things that pass quickly.

Eyes closed the static forms more distinc swirls. It looks like light suspended in black space. Like nebulas.

Open or closed sometimes points of light appear and vanish.

That's about it. The static came in after I started dabling in cannabis and psychedelics about 5 years ago. I think they are correlated. When it first started I would see pairs of black points that arose out of the static and faded back into it. I thought they could be repersentations of non-physical beings present but I have no idea.

This...

phosphenes

http://scienceline.org/2014/12/why-do-we-see-colors-with-our-eyes-closed/

Or an occasional vision, rarely

but never this below, not really   Is it the flag moving or the wind?

Yes. This.

"What do you see normally?" 

I don't know what 'baseline experience' is. I wish I did, because then I would have some way of knowing what *isn't* "baseline experience". And I bet that's cool

Anyway, there's no typical image, or 'baseline', everything seems to change on investigation, but I know I have some mental idea of what 'should be' there: that is black  / dark TV static.

since I started bothering to notice behind my eyelids (since I started reading talk about the fire kasina - cultural meme FTW!) it's gone from sometimes sparking/flashing lights, to *flavor of the month* colors, blue circle, red circle, green circle, coming in and out of focus, it's there when inclining towards it, circle with a halo sometimes, circle that goes to black then back to color again, circle that expands untill the whole field of vision is that color, circle that disappears, I consider this all to be mental image and some what deliberate intentional inclination to investigate the color & let it do what it wants to  But the color is *there* I didn't create it. It just seems brain decided "hey, we'll go with blue this month" 

At the moment: just black / various color static. It's not always that the color is there, and hasn't been recently. 

One day it was black / various color static then I noticed a pervading blue tone to it all. So the color was in space, as opposed to a circle then expanding out to space and so on. 

It would be similar to if you lay on a beach and closed your eyes and saw red then saw how the colors changed. Except it was blue. And no light source. 

These are just the things I remember. 

I don't read any significance into any of this, apart from, 'oh, this happened that time, that was kind of interesting' so are trees & passing aeroplanes if you listen to them closely   I don't know if these are states that others are talking about or not. 

The period of closing my eyes and *boom* there's a color was about October last year until roughly half way through a retreat period in early this year, (March) I think it's come back once or twice since then, but I think all my brain wiring has changed or I'm just not seeing in that way at the moment, my mental habits are different or something. 

i see lots of things in addition to the optical.

in my case, certain patterns of swirling luminosity announce, and in a way 'map' the stage of equanimity.

when really developed they turn into "star fields" which genuinely resemble that description except that they 'flow' over the imagined field of inner vision.

at an even more advanced stage (more intention, more involvement) the background luminosity expands and covers the entire internal visual field.

phosphenes are something that are easy to create via pressure on the eyes and other intricate geometric patterns resembling sacred geometry can come up spontaneously or due to changes in blood pressure in my case.

as I age, "floaters" are becoming more prevalent but I believe these to be actual physical stuff and not as interesting as the called up phenomena.

tom

"What do you see behind your eyelids?"

It looks dark but it feels bright.

I'm glad you mentioned this, Daniel, as I've been doing roughly the same thing for a while without realising it could be seen as kasina practice.

Do some meditation facing a ray of sunlight on your eyelids if you want to see more than the darkness shifting.  Sunset is a good time to do this outside, or even through a window.  The light begins to dance.