Studio 1537- Display intermittently stops working but is still "on"

Right now (and for the last week) the display on my 1537 is dark after start-up, but does show the backlight, so I know it's on.  If I hit function F8 like I'm switching to an external monitor, for a nano-second it will flash the correct image then go dark.   sometimes the image is perfect for that nanosecond, sometimes it's only showing half the screen, or it's smooshed over in one side of the display.  At start up of the computer, while it's doing all it's start-up activites, the screen will flash blue screens, then partially correct images, then lines, then black screen, then blue screens again, etc. in a seemingly random light show until it eventually settles down and just doesn't display anything (I can madly hit F8 repeatedly to get enough of  a picture to login if I have to, but it's really no way to use a computer).

This has happened perhaps 4-5 times in the last 6 months, and each time, the screen has spontaneously "healed" itself after anywhere from a day to a week.  But now it's been ~10 days and I'm sick of it.  The actual LCD is clearly capable of displaying the image, because it has come back from this before.  It doesn't seem to be a problem of generating the right image, b/c an external monitor works fine. 

I took off the bezel around the screen and disconnected and reconnected the display data cable and checked the display power cable...both fine. 

I thought maybe it was a loose wire or something, but the illness, or it's intermitant spontaneous healing, don't seem to have any correlation with moving the machine around like I would expect wtih that.

Any ideas?