This article is Day 12 of a long term vision improvement experiment. To get the full value of what I am learning, be sure to check out the introductory article which also has links to all of my updates.

It’s been awhile since my last update on the unglassed situation. I certainly don’t intend to make a habit of posting so sparsely, but I’ve been working on a neat project these past few days. I’ll have an announcement for it soon.

Driving

A question I’ve frequently been asked is whether I wear my glasses while driving. The answer is yes. The law requires me to do so even though I can see pretty well in broad daylight. Your pupils contract in bright light which actually reduces the effect of myopia somewhat. Similarly, myopic vision tends to get worse in the dark as your pupils expand. I would feel safe driving during the day with my glasses off, because daylight reduces my refractive error to a noticeable and helpful degree. At this point in the retraining of my vision, I would not consider driving at night without glasses.

I also wear my glasses when I play hockey. Combined with driving time, this amounts to about a dozen hours each week back under the dreaded negative lenses. Many of the reports of successful natural vision correction include small periods of time wearing the very glasses you’re trying to free yourself from. In this world, it would be hard to go completely without. I thought about taking a taxi everywhere, but it would be inconvenient. Especially since I live 20 minutes from a decent grocery store. And I’m not giving up hockey, either, so I’m stuck with my glasses for a while longer.

I wear my glasses so infrequently that I really notice them when I do wear them. Beyond being as annoying as ever, my glasses actually hurt my eyes a bit when I wear them. I wonder if my vision has improved by even a fraction of a diopter by now — maybe that explains why my vision with glasses seems super-sharp in a way that I don’t remember when I wore them all the time.

Magic Eye

My collection of children’s books now has a medical benefit! It may sound strange, but I’ve been practicing convergence and divergence with the help of old Magic Eye books. Remember those? You stare at a scrambled pattern in just the right way and a 3D image appears.

The illusion works when you converge or diverge your eyes, which is basically either going cross-eyed or focusing on a point behind the point you’re staring at, respectively. Many people have trouble doing this with their eyes. In fact, one of the guides I read actually suggests taking one week each to practice convergence, divergence, and rapidly switching between the two.

I have always had the ability to converge or diverge my vision at will. I never, ever had to pull the Magic Eye book up to my nose and slowly pull it away to get the image. I understand that many people lack the ability to see these pictures at will, but it’s a skill worth acquiring.

Converging and diverging your vision is one way to increase the strength of your extraocular muscles, which become underused when you rely on glasses to do your focusing for you. I’m sure that perfect vision is not as simple as just looking at Magic Eye books, but it’s good training. Rather than converging or diverging on some random spot, viewing a stereogram will produce an identifiable image when it’s done correctly. Most stereograms are designed to be viewed with divergence (or focusing into the distance), while a convergent (or cross-eyed) view will typically produce an inverted image. So you have an easy way to tell which way you’re focusing, since you need to practice both methods.

I’ve been taking time to converge and diverge on Magic Eye stereograms throughout each day. I challenge myself to hold the 3D view for as long as I can from further and further away.

Removing my glasses and warming up the muscles around my eyes is a slow but necessary part of fixing my vision. If this is going to work at all, it will happen very gradually and probably only after hours and hours of boring stuff. That’s okay, because better vision will be worth it — if it works, that is.

Related posts:

1. Reducing Myopia With Plus Lenses
2. The Key to Natural Vision Improvement
3. My First Day Without Glasses
4. My Eyesight Improved Since I Took Off the Glasses
5. Myopia is on the Rise – Can I Reverse Mine?