It is normal, it's an artifact of the way that your eyes perceive vision. That is, they barely see anything at all, and your brain fills in the rest of the information. That "static" is just your brain trying to cope with all of the information coming into it, and the reason that you can see it then, when your normally can't, is because you're actually trying to focus on how you're seeing, rather that what you're seeing. That is to say, if you focus on an object, your brain disregards everything else, including the fact that you can't really see anything outside of the center of your field of vision. But if you focus on a clear blue sky, or a plain white wall, you brain doesn't attach to anything in particular, and doesn't have anything to filter out.
There's a lot more to explain about it, but hopefully this cursory knowledge will give you a starting point to look into it in depth. I can't recommend any reading material, because most of what I know about how vision works was read second hand off of websites (And may be incorrect), but I'm sure if you poke around you can figure out more about it.
tl;dr, yeah, it's normal.
It is normal, it's an artifact of the way that your eyes perceive vision. That is, they barely see anything at all, and your brain fills in the rest of the information. That "static" is just your brain trying to cope with all of the information coming into it, and the reason that you can see it then, when your normally can't, is because you're actually trying to focus on how you're seeing, rather that what you're seeing. That is to say, if you focus on an object, your brain disregards everything else, including the fact that you can't really see anything outside of the center of your field of vision. But if you focus on a clear blue sky, or a plain white wall, you brain doesn't attach to anything in particular, and doesn't have anything to filter out.
There's a lot more to explain about it, but hopefully this cursory knowledge will give you a starting point to look into it in depth. I can't recommend any reading material, because most of what I know about how vision works was read second hand off of websites (And may be incorrect), but I'm sure if you poke around you can figure out more about it.
tl;dr, yeah, it's normal.