I'm Seeing Floaters

I explained to my mother that I can see dead people and she just told me to stop wiping my eyes with dirty hands. I'm trying to catch black dots that fall in every direction I look. Every time I try to focus, they begin to drift off. Is it floating spiritual energy or just some dirt in my eye?

Photo Courtesy of Google

A. Doctors call them eye floaters, which are circles, spots, or cloud-like objects that appear in the field of your vision, are only seen by that person and nothing is seen on the eye. The floaters are small, dark, shadowy shapes that you can not focus on because they dart away when you look at them, and they usually don't follow the eye movement since they drift only when the eye stops. Eye floaters can be seen if looking at a plain, light-colored background; To see them clearly look at a white piece of paper, a white wall, a clear sky and even light. Most people have had eye floaters before, but we learn to ignore them even if they become more prominent.


Photo Courtesy of The National Eye Institute

Floaters occur when the vitreous humour, a gel like substance that fills the space between the retina and the lens as well as other vertebrates and helps stabilize the eye, slowly shrinks. When the vitreous begins to shrink, it becomes stringy and the strands can create tiny shadows on the retina. As we get older the more the vitreous humour degenerates and can detach causing more floaters. If you have an eye injury severe enough that it changed the structure of the vitreous humour, you are likely to have retinal detachment along with more eye floaters. Flashes of light may appear as one gets more eye floaters. High blood pressure and migraines can also contribute tot the flashes of light. However, there are much more serious causes of floaters such as infection, inflammation, retinal tears, pregnancy, hemorrhaging, and other injuries to the eye. Floaters are very common in people with diabetes, near-sighted and people who are cataract operation.


Eye floaters are simply annoying and no treatment is really recommended because they are usually ignored. People do go to eye care professionals to see if there are more complicated issues. For extreme cases in which the floaters are so dense and numerous that they affect vision, there are laser treatments and surgery to remove them. This surgery is called vitrectomy, which is the removal of the vitreous gel along with the floating debris inside the eye. The vitreous is usually replaced with a salt solution and because the vitreous is mostly water, you would not know the difference.

http://www.eyecaresource.com/problems/eye-floaters.html
http://www.nei.nih.gov/health/floaters/index.asp