Strain impedes my sleep :(

[buli]

Hello all!
I have studied the forum but has not yet found something like my problem.
Please excuse my english, it is not my mothers tounge.

Some month ago I stumbled upon the Bates method and the theory makes very sense to me since I am into meditation and that kind of stuff.
I purchased the book called "help yourself to better eyesight" for the large amount of excercises it contains, but it has not yet helped me. Perhaps my persistence is lacking..

My problem is as follows:
The eye muscles that are used to converge the eyes are always tense.
I have slight near-sightedness, 0.5 (this is not a big problem for me).
I have always had trouble falling asleep, I can lay awake for 1-5 hours, with an average of 2 hours.
A couple of years ago I noticed that my eyes were tense when trying to sleep, and perhaps correctly saw it as the obstacle to sleep.
Some time passed, and a couple of months ago I started investigating how to relax my eyes. I read that the natural relaxing position for the eyes are when looking into distance.
Since childhood I have always had good conscious control over my eye muscles, I can perform acommodation unrelated to convergence, and vice versa.
I can diverge my eyes to parallell at will, but ONLY with my eyes open, not eyes closed. Perhaps that muscle activity is somehow in my brain associated with sight input?
I am totally unable to relax the eyes with the eyelids closed. It seems like the closing of the eyelids creates tension in the muscles that converge the eyes.
When I open my eyes, it is as if they are trained to have "default position" for viewing at short distance (converging at distance around 50 cm). Probably this is due to that my life hitherto has been filled with me putting attention to objects close to me for long uninterrupted periods of time (books, computers etc).
Some mornings they are relaxed after sleep (but tenes up after some minutes of use), some mornings they are not, and then they feel cramped and tense (mostly in those particular muscles)
I never feel well-rested, and in my opinion the tension is to blame.

Here are some questions that I hope you can answer:
1. How can I relieve the tension in my eyes?
2. Has the conscious control over my eyes made things worse?
3. Is there someone of you folks reading this that have/had a similar problem?
4. Is visualization of mental images or blackness the key to eye relaxation?
5. How is it possible to have a totally clear remembered image when trying to remember a situation or thing also puts attention to other aspects of that memory?
6. Is creating mental images a skill that is possible to perfect, or carved in stone during childhood?
7. What is the best exercise to train mental image creation?
8. I have realized that conscious control can not relax the eyes, but consciously diverging them before trying to let go of eye control can perhaps give the total-relaxing-thingy a head start?

Thank you for reading all this rubbish. I really hope you can grasp my problem, and perhaps answer a few questions.
Best regards,
Johan

[onamission]

Try palming for as long as you can bear in a quiet room by yourselve. While you're palming visualize something that pleases you and relaxes you and that you can remember the clearest out of all your other memorys,remember to throw in all the other senses(taste,smell,touch,hearing). Remember it as vivid as you can without any effort(hard to believe but without any effort or strain the memory becomes realer because your mind is at rest and is in its full potential)dont look at the black field or try to imagine your memory on it,its somewhere completely different(like david said in his past thread)lose yourselve basically.Dont think about your eyes at all pretend you dont even have eyes that this is occuring in your brain.When you open your eyes let everything come to your eyes dont try to see whats out there or make any effort. You should feel less strain in your eyes.