I'm a 28-year-old nearsighted male, and I've had floaters for as long
as I can remember.  I never found them too annoying; they were just
little translucent threads (maybe three different shapes) and I never
really noticed them unless I was really paying attention.

However, last night I had a terrible floater experience that I can not
ignore.

It began as I was lying in bed, looking at the ceiling.  The light was
off, and I noticed a sqiggly, spider-like object that seemed to be
dangling from the ceiling.  At first I wondered if a spider was in the
room or a bug was flying around, so I swatted at it.  Nothing seemed to
happen, so I got up and turned on the light.  There was nothing there.

I turned the light off and went back to bed, and I soon saw it again.
I turned my head around, and soon saw something a bit different...a
giant scribbley mess that seemed to turn and twist around in several
different ways.

Later on, I closed my eyes, and instead of the usual black background,
it was a deep reddish color -- and near the bottom of my field of
vision was a bunch of black, grass-like threads that swayed back and
forth, and sometimes bent and quiverred.

Just when I thought things couldn't get any weirder, I saw in the
center of my vision, a giant oval-shaped object with a bunch of tiny
hairs around it -- sort of like a giant paramecium.  The hairs wiggled
and curled just like the grassy stuff had before.

In the morning when the room was light, I looked at my white wall, and
saw what appeared to be a shadow of a tree branch.  But I soon realized
that it looked just like the grassy threads I had seen at night...and
soon afterward, the oval-shaped object returned and seemed to crawl
along the wall.  When I looked at another wall, I saw the same thing.

Throughout the day, these images gradually became dimmer and dimmer --
and at the present, they seem to have gone away.  But I'm still
concerned about this experience and what may have happened in my eye to
spur it on.  I NEVER want to see this horrid stuff again.

Like I said, I've had floaters in the past, but there were differences
between the former ones and the recent ones:

- My usual floaters are small and translucent -- these were big, black
and ugly.  They even seemed to be three-dimensional.

- My usual floaters are seen in daylight, but these I saw most vividly
in the dark and/or when my eyes were closed,  though I could still see
faint shadows of them with my eyes open.

I've read about things like vitreous/retinal detachment that can occur
after an increase of floaters, but I don't seem to have any of the
other symptoms (no light flashes, and my "normal" floaters haven't
increased.)

Still, I want to know if anyone else has experienced something like
this, and what may have happened in my eyes to cause it.  I'd also like
to know if I should get medical help for this, even if they seem to
have faded away.

(And for the record, no, I wasn't on any drugs last night, and I'm
pretty sure I wasn't dreaming it.)

Jeff