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If anyone has any doubts about whether or not to sleep–or even nap–in contact lenses, consider this cautionary tale: A man who wore his contact lenses overnight during a two-day hunting trip came home, took a shower, wiped his eyes with a towel, and heard a “pop” followed by searing eye pain. That was the sound of his cornea, the outer layer of his eye, ripping.

It turned out he had a perforated corneal ulcer from a bacterial infection, and he needed a corneal transplant right away to save his vision.

“When you get that bad of an infection, it’s like a boil or abscess in your skin. It will actually burst, and you’ll feel a pop, and then you’ll feel a gush of fluid,” says Thomas Steinemann, MD, clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The man’s story is one of six presented in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report published this week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine detailing the grisly things that can happen when you sleep in your contacts.

A third of the 45 million contact lens wearers in the U.S. sleep in their contacts, even though it can raise the risk of infection six- to eightfold. Those infections could lead to permanent vision loss, corneal abrasions (scratches on the surface of the eye), and worsening of dry eye.

“If you’re sleeping in your contact lenses, you need to stop,” says doctor of optometry (OD) Angela Bevels, founder and owner of Elite Dry Eye Spa in Tucson, Arizona. “Taking care of them requires you to take them out.”

Contact lenses collect all kinds of germs and debris during the day. If you sleep in them, there’s more chance of an infection.

“The debris from the contact lens and from the lid margins builds up, and the contact becomes toxic, and that’s what causes infection,” Bevels explains.

Rapid eye movement during sleep can make things even worse, says Samuel D. Pierce, OD, president of the American Optometric Association.

Plus, having that piece of plastic swimming in your eye also means your peepers aren’t getting enough oxygen–even if you're using so-called extended-wear lenses. Yes, they’re more porous, but they’re still blocking oxygen, and they’re still capturing junk.

“Any time you choose to sleep in a contact lens, whether it’s approved for continuous or extended wear or not, you put yourself at greater risk for a contact-lens-related complication,” Pierce says. “Just because the material is porous enough to allow enough oxygen in doesn’t mean that [sleeping in them] is the best thing to do. You have no idea what that contact lens has come into contact with, which would be spending the night in your eye.”