What he mean is a true dark adaptation which usually require at least 25min and up to 1hour for fully dark adaptation. Once you fully dark adapted, the sensitivity of your eye can increase up to 100,000 or more and a small bright light, such as the light from your camera LCD (even at lowest brightness setting) or Jupiter through a telescope can easily blind you for awhile and spoil your dark adaptation.Oh yeah Barry, I've read your Tips and Advice section earlier before and I wanted to offer some advice and improvements to certain sections. For night adaptation, I've personally noticed that once you begin to sink more into astronomy, it gets easier and takes a shorter time to adapt. For example, a 5-minute could become 2-minute. Well, it's different for everyone, but I've shortened my adaptation time by quite a significant figure. And as you know, light pollution is really terrible over here in Singapore, being able to spot a few bright stars just within 2 minutes of staring out is good enough. I've spotted M35, the Pleiades and a few other constellation like Auriga with my naked eyes by just looking out of my windows. I wasn't able to spot any of them when I first started, but it keeps getting better.
Anyway, I think what you experience are not dark adaptation, but improve in observing skill and know where and what to look for.
By the way, you got wonderful eyesight to be a able to spot M35 in Singapore sky using naked eye, so make sure you protect your eyesight...
Just to make sure you aware that it's illegal to own and use a laser pointer greater than 5mW in Singapore without a proper licence... Also, laser pointer is not a toy, so make sure you use it and handle it with care.I personally own a 5mW one and will be getting a 20mW novalasers soon.
Have a nice day.