Wayne Moses Burke

I’m doing something crazy. Is that news? Perhaps not, but here’s the plan:

I just ordered new glasses from an online seller. Infathomably, they were $19 (plus shipping). To keep it interesting, I ordered them with a weaker prescription than I probably should have to work on improving my sight and hopefully do away with my glasses altogether over time. Is this a good idea? Tell me what you think.The reason I’m doing this however is that I’ve had success with improving my vision in the past. I first noticed that things got better in college while I was delivering Chinese food for Ho Lee Chow (do you believe it? Anyway…). Within a month of squinting at house numbers in the dark, I found that I became better able to read them. My contacts at the time didn’t quite match my prescription (early contact technology, I guess) and at night, all lights would blur into a long thin streak - it was a pain. However, after a little delivery-driving-sight-therapy, I discovered that I could make the streak go away and vastly improve my night vision.

So, a couple of years later I’d switched to glasses and was driving home on the backroads of Michigan a little bored. (I don’t recommend anyone do this, of course…) I got to thinking about my vision, and decided to try a little experiment. I took off my glasses (keeping them in my right hand and ready to put back on immediately) and tried to focus on the passing road signs. Within ten minutes, I noticed a significant difference in my vision and was excited about it. However, ten minutes also seemed to wear out my eyes, so I put my glasses back on and headed for home (keep in mind, there was noone else on the road, the road was perfectly straight, and I knew it really well - I was being a little incautious, but not much in terms of becoming some form of automotive statistic).

This was fabulous, so I would take my glasses off at different points during the day for short periods of time to ‘exercise’ my eyes. What did I learn? My vision continued to improve. So much so that a couple days into this (literally), I was driving home from work at night and in the seven minutes that it took (glasses on), I had acquired a splitting headache - to the extent that I literally crawled up the stairs to my apartment and went straight to bed without dinner.

The next day, I decided that this was due to the improvement in my vision and began focusing on making my eyesight perfect for the glasses that I was wearing. From that day forward, my prescription has not changed and my eyesight has been perfect. Every once in a while, it will start to blur a little, and I’ll have to focus to bring it back to perfection, but that’s worked great for eight or ten years (I know it was the 90s, but I don’t remember when).

So, when I was practicing hypnotherapy, I did some personal work around my lack of vision and the emotional causes that created it and maintain it that way today. This was very effective and interesting, but didn’t really change how well I can see (incidentally, if it seems a little presumptuous or just downright silly that vision can be improved by resolving some sort of underlying emotional causes for it, I’m with you in spirit. How about we view it from the perspective that whether or not those emotional issues created the visual inacuity that I experience, the therapy still results in the resolution of issues that were affecting my life an a number of ways).

It seemed to me however, that a direct leap from impaired vision to perfect vision was just too much for my brain and/or eyes to handle. That is, I couldn’t function without my glasses even though I fully believed that I could improve my vision over time sufficiently to stop wearing them.

… time passed …

And now I’ve finally done something about it. I ordered these glasses with a weaker prescription. For $19, how can you beat it! I stand to lose very little - I can always just go back to my old glasses and move on with my life, knowing that I’ve failed. But if I succeed, I’m well on the road to no glasses whatsoever, and how exciting would that be?

Anyway, thanks for reading - let me know if you’ve done anything similar or if you just think I’m completely nutso!