06-24-2006, 05:46 PM
(I was originally going to post this in the introduction thread, but it started to get fairly long so I thought I'd start a new thread instead.)
I first noticed that something was amiss with my sight about four and a half years ago. I was a high school junior, and I had suddenly begun to notice that I had trouble seeing the overhead projector from the back of the room in my trigonometry class, couldn't read posters or wall clocks until I was embarrassingly close to them, and couldn't see my way around when driving at night as part of my training for my driver's license. After a few weeks of getting poor math grades and avoiding night driving I decided that it was time to come to grips with what I felt was the grim reality: I needed glasses.
Even at the time, I knew that I had most likely brought this upon myself. I had always been a reader, but over the past couple of years I had also started to shift from spending my free time outdoors with friends to supplementing my regular book-reading with an unhealthy addiction to the internet. Add homework and some television to that and one can imagine that my eyes practically never had a reason to focus beyond ten feet anymore.
Something I also liked to do around this time was go to bed late, slap on some headphones and stare at the ceiling while listening to Pink Floyd. Staring at the ceiling, I'd force my eyes to focus on the darkest point, which was hard to do at first. After a while, everything in my field of vision would stay black as long as I stayed focused. Perhaps the ocular damage caused by such a practice is negligible, but when I read what Bates wrote about his bored patient who entertained herself by staring at the clock to see double (or triple), it really struck home with me.
When I first got my glasses, I was overwhelmed by how powerful the lenses were. The doctor told me I'd get used to it very quickly, and I assumed of course that he, a doctor, knew what he was talking about, and it would do me well to listen to him. So I did. I quickly grew attached to the glasses, especially because my vision seemed even worse than before when I took them off. I had the spectacles for a year and half, and then I got a new pair as I headed off to college in late 2003. This time I splurged and picked up some expensive Flexon frames. My prescription was twice as strong (-2.25 cyl OS, -1.75 cyl & -25 sphere OD), and my addiction to lenses had increased proportionally.
I had these glasses until just over a year ago. By late 2004/early 2005, I had finally stopped liking my glasses so much. They were a nuisance. I wanted to get back into recreational sports, but the constant movement didn't exactly work well with the thin frames I had. People recommended contacts, but I have never been comfortable with the idea of handling my eyes. I tried playing without glasses, but the lack of good depth perception really threw things off.
Not to be defeated, I decided to start working out for exercise and try going without glasses for a week as a test. I wanted to see if my eyesight would get better. It didn't, but what I did notice after that week was that my glasses hurt my eyes when I put them on again, much like they did when I had first gotten them. I noticed how strange it felt to try to shift focus between things nearby and faraway when I had them on. Everything felt wrong.
I took to Google and looked at all manner of webpages and newsgroup posts about ways to improve vision naturally. I found all sorts of nonsense that most of us here have probably encountered: uninformed viewpoints on both sides, book after book by holistic healers, and flat-out lies. In my searching, the name William Bates also kept coming up.
It was that name that eventually led me to Imagination Blindness. I read all the testimonies people had posted on the guestbook and soon became quite inspired. I read the books by Bates and his wife. I knew what I had to do.
On the first of May, 2005, I decided that I was going to throw away my glasses and start practicing what I'd learned in the books. Perhaps I fell victim to delusions of grandeur, as I envisioned myself seeing perfectly in a couple short months based on some of the anecdotes Bates shared in his book. Even though it has taken some time to get to where I am now, the final exams I took that May went fine, and I didn't have any problems at work over the summer either.
I didn't start having clear flashes until late 2005. I remember my first one well; I was walking out of the physics building, located in the center of the main area of the campus, and I had turned my head away from my friend for a moment and noticed that everything was incredibly colorful and richly detailed in a way I'd never noticed before. I blinked and it was gone. This happened about once or twice a month, always as unexpectedly, and always gone after a blink or two.
Towards the end of the semester in April or so of this year, I started getting frustrated. Sure, I was having the clear flashes, but it seemed to me that I wasn't making much progress. I was sick of having people call out my name and wave from far away because I never could tell who they were, I was tired of having to sit close-up at lectures and I still had the problem of needing to be near the clock to tell the time. After spending some more time with Bates-related literature and some thinking, I realized that I hadn't been applying the principles I'd been studying nearly as often as I should have. I needed to start doing them all the time.
If I found myself staring, I'd stop. I started tracing the edges of everything with my eyes as I walked. "Central fixation" became my mantra. When I'd close my eyes to daydream or palm, I thought of how clear and beautiful the world seemed when I was a child.
As the semester came to a close last month, I moved into a house in the city where I go to school with a couple friends. My driver's license had recently expired and I figured I ought to renew it, so I went to the DMV to get that taken care of. After waiting forever in line, it was finally time for me to approach the counter. It was time for me to get my vision test. I was told to read line B in the vision testing machine they had on the counter, and I couldn't. I was really hoping for a clear flash, but it didn't come. I didn't have the required 20/40 vision to get an unrestricted license.
So it was finally time to see an optometrist again. At the time of my visit I saw at 20/70, which was enough to get a license for unrestricted daylight driving, and got my new prescription.
Finally, some concrete sign of improvement! -1.25 in both eyes this time, although the astigmatism was still there. This was pure encouragement. I didn't get any glasses made, of course.
The next few weeks were normal.
And then it happened! The blink that changed my life!
It was a sunny afternoon and I was driving back from my parents' house. I was slowly approaching a red light and I happened to glance over at a fruit market across the street. I blinked as I returned my gaze to the road before me, and when I did I noticed something remarkable. A clear flash richer than any I'd had until that point.
I was looking at everything around me for the next two seconds, enjoying the clarity, finding beauty in street-signs and rundown factories. I didn't want to blink because I knew that everything would go back to normal, but I knew that I had to.
The world remained clear, so I blinked again. And again. And again and again and again.
It was then that I realized that this clear flash was different than every other one I'd experieced until that point. It felt permanent.
My eyes felt so light, there was an incredible depth in every direction I looked, text on signs felt like it was jumping out at me, and every edge I saw was precisely defined. It felt permanent.
And it has been permanent, because my eyesight hasn't changed since then.
To celebrate, I went to the DMV on Wednesday to get the vision restriction removed from my license. The woman at the counter looked at me with a bit of skepticism, but I read the smallest line with ease.
With ease--that's how I see everything now. And it feels great.
I first noticed that something was amiss with my sight about four and a half years ago. I was a high school junior, and I had suddenly begun to notice that I had trouble seeing the overhead projector from the back of the room in my trigonometry class, couldn't read posters or wall clocks until I was embarrassingly close to them, and couldn't see my way around when driving at night as part of my training for my driver's license. After a few weeks of getting poor math grades and avoiding night driving I decided that it was time to come to grips with what I felt was the grim reality: I needed glasses.
Even at the time, I knew that I had most likely brought this upon myself. I had always been a reader, but over the past couple of years I had also started to shift from spending my free time outdoors with friends to supplementing my regular book-reading with an unhealthy addiction to the internet. Add homework and some television to that and one can imagine that my eyes practically never had a reason to focus beyond ten feet anymore.
Something I also liked to do around this time was go to bed late, slap on some headphones and stare at the ceiling while listening to Pink Floyd. Staring at the ceiling, I'd force my eyes to focus on the darkest point, which was hard to do at first. After a while, everything in my field of vision would stay black as long as I stayed focused. Perhaps the ocular damage caused by such a practice is negligible, but when I read what Bates wrote about his bored patient who entertained herself by staring at the clock to see double (or triple), it really struck home with me.
When I first got my glasses, I was overwhelmed by how powerful the lenses were. The doctor told me I'd get used to it very quickly, and I assumed of course that he, a doctor, knew what he was talking about, and it would do me well to listen to him. So I did. I quickly grew attached to the glasses, especially because my vision seemed even worse than before when I took them off. I had the spectacles for a year and half, and then I got a new pair as I headed off to college in late 2003. This time I splurged and picked up some expensive Flexon frames. My prescription was twice as strong (-2.25 cyl OS, -1.75 cyl & -25 sphere OD), and my addiction to lenses had increased proportionally.
I had these glasses until just over a year ago. By late 2004/early 2005, I had finally stopped liking my glasses so much. They were a nuisance. I wanted to get back into recreational sports, but the constant movement didn't exactly work well with the thin frames I had. People recommended contacts, but I have never been comfortable with the idea of handling my eyes. I tried playing without glasses, but the lack of good depth perception really threw things off.
Not to be defeated, I decided to start working out for exercise and try going without glasses for a week as a test. I wanted to see if my eyesight would get better. It didn't, but what I did notice after that week was that my glasses hurt my eyes when I put them on again, much like they did when I had first gotten them. I noticed how strange it felt to try to shift focus between things nearby and faraway when I had them on. Everything felt wrong.
I took to Google and looked at all manner of webpages and newsgroup posts about ways to improve vision naturally. I found all sorts of nonsense that most of us here have probably encountered: uninformed viewpoints on both sides, book after book by holistic healers, and flat-out lies. In my searching, the name William Bates also kept coming up.
It was that name that eventually led me to Imagination Blindness. I read all the testimonies people had posted on the guestbook and soon became quite inspired. I read the books by Bates and his wife. I knew what I had to do.
On the first of May, 2005, I decided that I was going to throw away my glasses and start practicing what I'd learned in the books. Perhaps I fell victim to delusions of grandeur, as I envisioned myself seeing perfectly in a couple short months based on some of the anecdotes Bates shared in his book. Even though it has taken some time to get to where I am now, the final exams I took that May went fine, and I didn't have any problems at work over the summer either.
I didn't start having clear flashes until late 2005. I remember my first one well; I was walking out of the physics building, located in the center of the main area of the campus, and I had turned my head away from my friend for a moment and noticed that everything was incredibly colorful and richly detailed in a way I'd never noticed before. I blinked and it was gone. This happened about once or twice a month, always as unexpectedly, and always gone after a blink or two.
Towards the end of the semester in April or so of this year, I started getting frustrated. Sure, I was having the clear flashes, but it seemed to me that I wasn't making much progress. I was sick of having people call out my name and wave from far away because I never could tell who they were, I was tired of having to sit close-up at lectures and I still had the problem of needing to be near the clock to tell the time. After spending some more time with Bates-related literature and some thinking, I realized that I hadn't been applying the principles I'd been studying nearly as often as I should have. I needed to start doing them all the time.
If I found myself staring, I'd stop. I started tracing the edges of everything with my eyes as I walked. "Central fixation" became my mantra. When I'd close my eyes to daydream or palm, I thought of how clear and beautiful the world seemed when I was a child.
As the semester came to a close last month, I moved into a house in the city where I go to school with a couple friends. My driver's license had recently expired and I figured I ought to renew it, so I went to the DMV to get that taken care of. After waiting forever in line, it was finally time for me to approach the counter. It was time for me to get my vision test. I was told to read line B in the vision testing machine they had on the counter, and I couldn't. I was really hoping for a clear flash, but it didn't come. I didn't have the required 20/40 vision to get an unrestricted license.
So it was finally time to see an optometrist again. At the time of my visit I saw at 20/70, which was enough to get a license for unrestricted daylight driving, and got my new prescription.
Finally, some concrete sign of improvement! -1.25 in both eyes this time, although the astigmatism was still there. This was pure encouragement. I didn't get any glasses made, of course.
The next few weeks were normal.
And then it happened! The blink that changed my life!
It was a sunny afternoon and I was driving back from my parents' house. I was slowly approaching a red light and I happened to glance over at a fruit market across the street. I blinked as I returned my gaze to the road before me, and when I did I noticed something remarkable. A clear flash richer than any I'd had until that point.
I was looking at everything around me for the next two seconds, enjoying the clarity, finding beauty in street-signs and rundown factories. I didn't want to blink because I knew that everything would go back to normal, but I knew that I had to.
The world remained clear, so I blinked again. And again. And again and again and again.
It was then that I realized that this clear flash was different than every other one I'd experieced until that point. It felt permanent.
My eyes felt so light, there was an incredible depth in every direction I looked, text on signs felt like it was jumping out at me, and every edge I saw was precisely defined. It felt permanent.
And it has been permanent, because my eyesight hasn't changed since then.
To celebrate, I went to the DMV on Wednesday to get the vision restriction removed from my license. The woman at the counter looked at me with a bit of skepticism, but I read the smallest line with ease.
With ease--that's how I see everything now. And it feels great.
