So I’m legally blind but still have a lot of usable vision, mostly just useful to get around my environment. I was wondering if anyone else in a similar situation can relate;

At night or in dark places, my brain really does not like shadows. For instance, when I walk down the hall from my bedroom to the bathroom, I can see all the way across the house into the dining room. Usually we hang our coats on the backs of our chairs, so they are just blobs of darkness to me in the dim light. I know they are the chairs with coats, but because I’m not able to actually see and confirm that’s what they are, my flight or fight is triggered and I cannot force myself to walk down the hall. My primitive brain sees potential danger and won’t let me proceed.

I have other instances where I can’t properly see what’s in front of me so my brain scrambles to try to figure it out. This often leads to me thinking that a dried leaf on the floor is a dead bird, a sweatshirt is my cat, a stack of items is a person, etc. I’m pretty sure this phenomenon of the brain making up things to compensate for vision loss is a named condition (and it’s not Charles Bonnet Syndrome)

Sometimes I’ll also have “glitches.” If there’s something dark in my visual field (typically a chunk of my bangs lol), and if I move my head/eyes too quickly, the darkness will smudge and I’ll see dark shapes in random places. Sometimes it looks like there is a critter scrambling across the floor or a figure poking out from doorways because of what I described in the previous paragraph.

It’s kind of creepy, but it’s also fun sometimes. Anyone else?