We Are Luminous Beings: On Phosphenes, Biophotons, and Autistic Perception
Seeing Light in the Dark: Phosphenes, Neurodivergence, and the Luminous Bodymind
A lifelong reflection on phosphenes, biophotons, and the gentle lights behind closed eyes—what science pathologises, I reclaim as wonder, sensory poetry, and autistic glow. We shine. Not metaphor. Biology.
Introduction: When the Lights Come On
It started, as it often does, with the lights behind my eyes. It was late—bedtime, after dark. The house had settled into its hush, and I’d slipped beneath the covers, limbs loose with exhaustion, mind still flickering. Somewhere in the room, the soft, otherworldly strains of Carolyn’s Fingers threaded through the air like breath. That voice—not quite decipherable, not needing to be—was more texture than lyric, more gesture than sentence. I closed my eyes. And there they were again: the phosphenes. Gentle arcs, points, and sheets of light, blooming and dissolving, shifting across the dark canvas behind my eyelids. I’ve known them all my life. They’ve never been frightening—if anything, they’ve been a kind of company. Not voices, not visions, but a quiet, glimmering presence. As a child, I thought of them as a private show. As an adult, I let them drift by without much thought, like the way one listens to rain.
But that night something changed. I didn’t just notice them—I wondered. Not diagnostically. Not with suspicion. But with that soft, urgent curiosity that opens a door in the dark. What are these lights? Why have they always been there, faithful and fluid? What are they made of? Are they mine alone, or are there others who drift off to sleep watching this same private constellation? I didn’t know, but I wanted to. And so—still wrapped in the lull of Cocteau Twins, still watching the lights—I began to look.
Lifelong Companions: A Sensory Constant
They’ve always been there. For as long as I can remember, the phosphenes have been a constant—like the grain of film on old home movies, or the low murmur of a river heard through thick glass. Not dramatic. Not disruptive. Just there. A quiet shimmer at the edges of consciousness, waiting. As a child I didn’t have a name for them, only the sense that they belonged to me—that they lived somewhere between imagination and biology, and somehow made both feel more vivid. I used to play with them, lying on my back in the dark, eyes closed, fingers laced behind my head. Sometimes I’d wonder: were they responding to the music? If I listened closely—really listened—did they shift when the rhythm did?
There were nights when I’d test it, on purpose. Little Fluffy Clouds would bubble through the headphones, and the lights would swirl in sync, like they were caught in the same desert sunloop. Halcyon would come on, and they’d stretch longer, blurrier, like the bass itself had softened their edges. And Progression Sessions—oh, those Bukem sets—would send them darting in finer, sharper lines, dancing like starlings through jungle snares. But nothing moved them quite like Liz Fraser’s voice. It was as though her vowels summoned colour. I never questioned it. I never worried that they weren’t real. They were real in the way dreams are real—subjective, consistent, emotionally trustworthy. They weren’t symptoms. They weren’t signs. They were an ambient part of my mind’s weather system, a gentle visual stimming that needed no meaning to matter.
The Research Rabbit Hole: Looking for Understanding
A few nights ago, I decided to look them up. Not idly, not in passing—really look. I wanted to know if anyone else saw what I saw when they closed their eyes. Surely, I thought, this must be a shared human thing. Something gentle, something unremarkable in the best sense—like the way most people can hear their heartbeat in water, or smell rain before it starts. I expected to find whimsical essays or sleepy forum threads, maybe a few casual mentions in the literature. Instead, I fell straight into the medical model’s waiting jaws.
Phosphenes, it turns out, are almost exclusively spoken of in clinical terms. They’re framed as the result of migraines, epilepsy, retinal trauma, optic nerve damage, multiple sclerosis, or exposure to radiation therapy. Or they’re induced—by transcranial magnetic stimulation, electric shocks, or psychotropic drugs. If you see lights with your eyes closed, it must be because something’s wrong. Something misfiring. Something broken. The studies catalogue them like symptoms: frequency, intensity, duration. I combed through dozens of papers, all full of worry, caution, thresholds, and thresholds crossed. Nothing about comfort. Nothing about curiosity. Nothing about how they might simply exist—not as warning signs, but as quiet companions.
There was a jarring absence in all of it: no language for naturalness, no space for wonder, and absolutely no framework for a neurodivergent phenomenology. No one seemed to consider that some of us might simply live with phosphenes the way we live with our dreams or our textures or our rhythms. That for some minds—minds like mine—they might be less a medical artefact and more a form of ambient knowing.
One Beacon in the Dark: István Bókkon’s Biophoton Theory
Bókkon, I. (2008). Phosphene phenomenon: A new concept. Bio Systems, 92 2, 168-74 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2008.02.002.
Just as I was about to give up—tired of combing through abstracts full of deficits and diagnoses—I found a flicker. A single paper, quietly published in Biosystems back in 2008, by a Hungarian pharmacology student named István Bókkon. Phosphene Phenomenon: A New Concept, it was called. I clicked, half-expecting more of the same. But what I found was something different—something quietly luminous.
Bókkon proposed that phosphenes aren’t mere neurological static or signs of malfunction. They’re not symptoms at all. They are, quite literally, light. Not imagined light, not metaphor, but actual photons—biophotons—emitted by the cells of the visual system as part of ordinary, ongoing metabolic processes. According to his theory, these ultraweak flashes of light are the result of oxidative activity in the brain, and under the right conditions, we become aware of them. They rise into consciousness, crossing the perceptual threshold like embers catching a breeze.
The beauty of this idea caught me off guard. It wasn’t medicalised. It wasn’t fearful. It was gentle, scientific, and strangely poetic. Bioluminescence, he suggested, isn’t just the domain of jellyfish and deep-sea creatures—it lives within us. Our brains shimmer, faintly and constantly, with light. And when I close my eyes and see the shapes drift and scatter, I’m not witnessing dysfunction—I’m glimpsing the natural glow of my own biology. Not pathology. Not error. Just life, doing what it does.
The Lighting for the Theatre of My Mind
If Bókkon’s theory gave me the science, what followed was a remembering—a return to metaphor, to meaning shaped not by data but by rhythm, resonance, and story. I realised I’d already named them, years ago, in the language of my own life: the lighting crew for the Theatre of My Mind. That’s what the phosphenes have always felt like—not objects or hallucinations, but a kind of ambient stagecraft. A presence that cues the moment, softens the frame, readies the scene. They don’t speak. They don’t direct. They illuminate.
As a gestalt processor, this makes intuitive sense. I don’t perceive in pieces; I live in atmospheres. Mood is meaning. Shape and sound are never separate. So when the lights dance behind my eyes, they don’t do so randomly—they arrive with tone, with tempo. I used to lie in bed and test it, like a rehearsal for some sensory opera. If I put on ambient techno, the phosphenes would drift slow and wide, almost tidal. Drum & bass? Sharper now, angular, flickering in synch with the breakbeat. Scottish dreampop—especially those early Cocteau Twins records—would draw them out in long, luminous arcs, all shimmer and hush.
They aren’t symbols. They don’t stand in for anything else. They are atmosphere—invitation—presence. Like the ghost light left on in a theatre between performances, they remind me that something is always about to begin. Memory, image, imagination—they all find their place on that phosphene-lit stage. And in that space, there is no deficit. Only quiet, and light, and breath.
Beyond Synesthesia: A Different Kind of Wholeness
I should say here—and say it gently—that what I experience isn’t synaesthesia, at least not in the classical sense. I don’t see the letter A and think red. I don’t taste shapes or hear colours. And I don’t mean to diminish those who do. Synaesthesia is a beautiful and valid way of perceiving, a sensory interweaving that I recognise as deeply real and meaningful for many. But I name the difference because I’ve had people assume that my way of processing must be synaesthetic, when in truth it’s something else entirely—something just as rich, but structured differently.
When I see letters, they arrive not as colours or codes but as inhabited spaces—as whole scenes. Like a Richard Scarry book, each letter is a bustling, self-contained world. There are characters and storylines and backdrops; there’s a mood, a texture, an emotional temperature. The letter isn’t red—it’s a bakery with a fox in an apron and a chimney puffing flour. It’s a train station or a kitchen or a crowded library in late afternoon light. It’s not a mapping. It’s an entry.
And the phosphenes—those drifting lights—aren’t symbols, either. They don’t stand in for something else. They don’t mean something in the way language often demands. They belong. They are part of the inner landscape, part of the sensory ecology in which my mind moves and makes meaning. For me, perception isn’t a grid of data points or a series of sensory inputs to be sorted. It’s thematic, narrative, scenic. A light cues a story. A sound folds into an image. A pattern invites memory. And so the phosphenes, like so much else in my internal world, aren’t extras—they are part of the set, part of the stage, part of the whole.
We Are Luminous Beings
Later that week, still turning it all over in my mind, I put on Glitter by Toronto’s Keys N Krates—headphones on, night falling, phosphenes flickering softly behind my eyes. The song swelled, luminous and layered, and I found myself caught in that chorus: “We shine, we shine, we shine… shine like glitter, glitter.” And something clicked—not metaphor, but resonance. I wasn’t just hearing a lyric. I was recognising a truth.
Bókkon’s theory had already shifted the ground beneath me. That phrase—“Biophotons are common, intrinsic emissions from living cells—not pathological but foundational to biological life”—felt like something sacred. A quiet undoing of all the stories that framed unusual perception as damage. To know that we all emit light, faint and constant, from within our very cells—that was not just science. That was affirmation.
And I thought: of course we do. Of course we shine. My autistic system, my GLP wiring, my lifelong companion lights behind closed eyes—none of this is incidental. None of it is broken. My mind builds stories in constellations. My thoughts arrive as full rooms, not fragments. My language is relational, recursive, scenic. Why wouldn’t the body mirror that too? Why wouldn’t I be built to glow?
The phosphenes aren’t signs of malfunction. They are evidence of participation. Of motion. Of life happening from the inside out. And when that song says “We shine like glitter”, it feels less like poetry and more like a biological imperative. A kind of clockwork radiance. We are not waiting to be lit by something else. We are the light.
We shine. We shimmer. We flicker in the dark, even when no one is looking.
Whimsy as Method, Wonder as Resistance
The deeper I went, the more I realised: the medical model has no room for wonder. It catalogues, defines, pathologises. It asks what’s wrong, not what’s unfolding. But my lived experience has always insisted on something else—on meaning, on metaphor, on joy. For me, the lights behind my eyes have never been a clinical footnote. They’ve been a constant act of quiet rebellion. In a world that treats unusual perception as flaw, my phosphenes remain ungovernable. They don’t ask to be understood in pathological terms. They ask to be felt—as warmth, as shimmer, as presence.
When I hear that old lyric—“I shine like glitter”—it doesn’t feel symbolic anymore. It feels like cellular truth. Biophotons aren’t metaphor. They’re measurable, observable, part of how life sustains itself. That we shine—literally, biologically—isn’t something science needs to rescue from whimsy. It’s something whimsy already knew.
So I begin to wonder, not just about the lights themselves, but about how many others see them too. How many children lie in the dark and trace their own internal constellations, never knowing there’s a name for it—or that the names they've been given are wrong? How many autistic minds, like mine, live immersed in subtle forms of sensory poetry that never make it into the literature? How many of us have known this phosphene-light for years, maybe all our lives, and simply folded it into the wallpaper of being?
Wonder, in this context, becomes resistance. To insist on beauty. To refuse flattening. To shine like glitter, not as a flourish, but as a fact.
Conclusion: Turning Toward the Light
So this, then, is a quiet call. Not a conclusion, exactly—more a turning. A gesture toward wonder. Toward the soft, often-unnoticed details that shape how we move through the world. The lights behind our eyes. The textures we reach for. The scenes that unfold unspoken. It’s an invitation to pay attention—not with scrutiny, but with gentleness. To honour what doesn’t need to be explained to be true.
If you’ve ever seen the shimmer in the dark and paused—not in fear, but in curiosity—you’re not alone. If you’ve ever watched shapes drift behind your eyelids and felt, inexplicably, accompanied—you’re not imagining things. There is light in you. There is light in all of us. Some of it science can explain. Some of it it can’t. But all of it belongs.
I think of the Theatre again. The house lights dimmed. The audience hushed. Nothing on stage yet, but the promise of it. And there, above the boards, in that hush before story—a flicker. Not spectacle. Not signal. Just light, waiting. Just the beginning.