The Weekly Screed (#914)

What do you see on 

the insides of your eyelids?

By David Benjamin

PARIS — Perhaps the most felicitous happenstance in my return here last week was an encounter with Dr. Patrick Keeffe, Ph.D., MBOE, LSMFT, who told me over frog legs at a sprawling brasserie near the Gare du Nord, about his groundbreaking research on negative sight visual patterns, or NSVP.

Dr. Keeffe, who is now Emeritus Fellow at the National Ocular Research Center (NORC) in Huntington, New York, explained to me, over a surprisingly toothsome bottle of Chateau Petit Musc, that what people see with our eyes closed offers an eerily accurate key to each human being’s potential, psyche and character.

 

“Patterns and images appear before your eyes — on the insides of your eyelids, as we say in the laboratory — that are as unique as fingerprints,” said Dr. Keeffe, who was invited here to speak at an international ocular conference. “They are proving to be an almost infallible measure of each person’s possibilities, their quirks and flaws, their abilities, passions and handicaps.”

He added, “It’s a little scary.”

Dr. Keeffe offered an example. “Prisons provide a sort of captive population for our work. We’ve discovered that the worst of these convicts, the remorseless murderers, the rapists of children, the arsonist who blocked all the doors of a church during Sunday services and then set it on fire — these hardened fiends all saw on the inside of their eyelids a random pastiche of squares, dots and lines, a pattern much like the QR codes that are now ubiquitous in digital commerce.”

Dr. Keeffe went on. “When I find a patient still loose in society who describes an NSVP like that, my blood runs cold. I know that eventually this seemingly benign person will almost certainly rise up and commit unspeakable crimes! But until he rapes or she kills, what can I do? Who can I tell? Where can I go?”

The distinguished professor fidgeted in frustration, wordlessly lamenting his impotence to interfere in the evolution of a murderer, thief or pedophile who has not yet killed, stolen or molested. 

Thankfully, we went on to lighter aspects of Dr. Keeffe’s remarkable discoveries at NORC. He said that a consistent herringbone pattern on the inner eyelid — which is quite common — denotes a cheerful and well-adjusted individual. Houndstooth checks, on the other hand, occur in people who are timid, withdrawn and prone to chew their cuticles.

Plaids are also prevalent in NSVP, Dr. Keeffe explained, but colors are very important. Green plaids appear on the eyelids of men — never women — with cool and aloof personalities, often drawn to outdoor professions like lawn care, forest management, gazelle hunting and mountaineering. A substantial number of beachcombers and homeless vagabonds have green-plaid NSVP.

 

Conversely, red and blue plaids occur most often in flighty and excitable women who gravitate toward careers in speed-skating, puppetry, TV journalism and high-end prostitution.

 

“We’ve encountered quite a few subjects, mostly male, who see thousands of squiggly wormlike images writhing ceaselessly on the inside of their eyelids. We call this pattern the James Bond syndrome, because we’ve noticed that these subjects are highly competent in daring, even dangerous jobs like auto-racing, cliff-diving and bronco-busting, but they’re fiercely averse to commitment. Their rare relationships tend to be short and end abruptly, sometimes in violence,” said Dr. Keeffe.

“Even worse is when the tiny worms sometimes grow up and turn into snakes,” the scientist added. “Almost always, there is physical abuse. Put simply, James Bond starts beating the hell out of Pussy Galore.”

Dr. Keeffe confided in me that for many years his own eyelid pattern consisted of streaky gray bands above what appeared to be a rolling bank of thunderclouds. Remembering his own unusual NSVP, Dr. Keeffe undertook a search for similar subjects. When found, these cloudbank “guinea pigs” proved to be socially bashful and suspicious of other people’s motives. They displayed a tendency to stay indoors for days on end, during which they would watch game shows and overeat. “That was pretty much me, all the way through high school. ‘Family Feud’ and two bags of Cheetos,” confessed Dr. Keeffe with a sheepish grin. “Until one Friday night when I got laid by Lou Anne, my kid sister’s babysitter!”

He added, “After that, all I could see on my eyelids were high cirrus clouds and little purple Chevrolets doing doughnuts on the sky.”

Dr. Keeffe said that one of NORC’s rarest cases was a young woman whose eyelids projected into her brain a 1950s television test pattern with an American Indian chief, in full feathered head dress, as its centerpiece. “This subject was outgoing and highly sociable to the point of outright promiscuity,” said Dr. Keeffe. “At first, she could be completely charming. But she would latch on to people and demand more and more from them both practically and emotionally, until she just plain wore them out and they rejected her. By the time we got to her, she had gone through hundreds of friends, lovers, roomies, sidekicks and BFFs, not to mention her twelve fiancés. We feared that her repeated failures would accumulate to the point where she would sink into the sort of despondency that leads to suicide.”

I asked if nothing could be done for this woman. “Of course,” replied Dr. Keeffe. “Doris Day.” 

He looked a little embarrassed. “We’ve learned lately that repetitive, fairly mindless and often tedious external stimuli— or positive sight visual patterns (PSVP) — can slowly alter the most stubbornly pernicious NSVPs. So we sat her down and made her watch every Doris Day movie ever filmed, each day for twelve hours, over and over again. After a month, she could sing from memory the entire score of Calamity Jane.”

“And Calamity Jane cured her?” I asked.

“In a way, yes,” said Dr. Keeffe. “Her test-pattern NSVP was persistent. She still saw that damn Indian chief. But she altered her own expectations of herself and of other people toward her. She ended up working in a profession that pits overeager self-promotion against a universal pattern of relentless and ruthless rejection. She became a Democratic woman politician in Mississippi.”

 

I asked Dr. Keeffe about his most memorable case.

“That would have to be Honest Abe,” he said.

“Lincoln?”

“Yes, Abraham Lincoln,” said Dr. Keeffe. “In one of his diaries, reportedly unearthed by Doris Kearns Goodwin, he actually described his own NSVP. It seems that, inexplicably, Lincoln’s inner eyelids were splattered with hundreds of tiny women wearing what could only be described as bikinis.”

“Bikinis?” I asked. “You mean, bathing suits?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Keeffe. “But, of course, the bikini was a concept unheard of at that time. Lincoln didn’t know what to make of this weird vision on his eyelids. He seems to have been fascinated, however. He wrote rather elliptically about his desire to draw swimwear sketches and possibly include big-brimmed hats and flower-patterned pareo skirts, with colorful accessories — beads, bracelets, navel rings, that sort of thing. Quite daring in those days. But then, along came Fort Sumter and the Civil War.”

“His energies were diverted,” I said, “to saving the Union.”

“Sadly, yes. Abe’s fashion-design dream was forever deferred.”

“I’m amazed. You learned all of this,” I said, “from the inside of Abe Lincoln’s eyelids!”

“Yes, if we can believe his diary,” said Dr. Keeffe. “Rumor has it, you know, that Abe was finally explaining the bikini to Mrs. Lincoln that night at Ford’s Theatre.”