> > I've had two migraines, one in junior high and one in college. They both just came on suddenly (the one in junior high I had spots in front of my eyes for about an hour before the actual onset, but at the time I didn't know that was a symptom of an oncoming migraine, so the actual headache part was still "without warning" to me.)
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> The spots you saw are called an "aura" and are one symptom of migraines. A class I took talked about these and I learned that a migraine might or might not include auras and that it was possible to have a migraine that had auras but no headache (which seemed wrong). For some people, the aura could be spots or lines and for others it could be a complete block of certain areas in the field of vision that could grow or move.

I always used to get those when I had migraines. It was always the same aura, too. It would start off as a small, bright, glittery hole in my vision (rather hard to describe), which over an hour or so would spiral itself into a large vertical semicircle of bright glittery spots, in constant flowing motion, somewhat like an electric sign where the light appears to "flow" along the row of lightbulbs. It would always be on the right side of my field of vision, and once it had developed to the moving-semicircle stage, it would stay like that for the entire day. When I closed my eyes I could see it very brightly, but I preferred that to the even worse open-eyed view of big sparkly moving holes in the world. Quite apart from the migraine itself, the aura was very disorienting and unpleasant.

Brunnen-"so very, very glad to have outgrown those"G