What is it called when you have dark floaters in your eyes?!

What is it called when you have dark floaters in your eyes?

These drive me nuts and I get more and more. They interfere with reading because they connect words or block out some. With a light background I can focus on them and they look like lint. It's like my eyeballs need exfoliated. I use to rub them when I first got them thinking I had something in my eye.

The back of the eye is filled with a jelly like substance called the vitreous humour. As the vitreous humour gets older, strands of a protein called collagen start to become visible within it. These strands swirl gently when the eye moves. Rather than being solid blobs, floaters are actually shadows cast on the retina by these pieces of collagen. This is because light travels through the vitreous in order to reach the retina, so any objects in the vitreous reflect on the retina.
Floaters are linked to the age of the eye and generally affect people over the age of 40. They are most common in people in their 60s and 70s. This is when the vitreous humour starts to shrink away from the retina, causing it to thicken and clump together, and leading to floaters. This is called posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). The debris left at the site where the vitreous separates from the retina become floaters.
Sometimes, as the vitreous humour pulls on the retina, it cause tiny blood vessels in the retina to burst and bleed into the vitreous slightly. Red blood cells in the blood appear as tiny black dots, or may look like a swarm of gnats, or like smoke. As the blood is re-absorbed, these sort of floaters generally go away, although it can take a few months.
In about half of all people, the vitreous humour has separated from the retina by the age of 50. This normally doesn't cause any problems and most people aren't aware that it has happened. Hope this helps. meg