eyesight, its all in your head

the title of this post was said by wrey, and if i don't say that i will be in trouble with the aspie police.

driving wrey to school this morning, i was a ways up the road when i suddenly realized i wasn't wearing my glasses. this realization hit me not because i couldn't see, but because i swept my hand across my forehead to push my stocking cap (lovingly hand-knitted for me by me sis) up out of my eyes. a nano-second of "whoa, my face feels light, open, and unobstructed" and then it hit me, "oh shit, i'm out on the road driving, with my kid in the car, and i'm not wearing my freakin glasses!"

the thing is, i could see perfectly fine before i noticed that my glasses were not sittin on my face. then, Suddenly, i couldn't see a freakin thing! had to limp back home cautiously, hoping not to hit anything living, and retrieve them.

this is by far Not the first time this has happened. the first time was back in the late 90's, and i was shocked, confused, and awe-struck. it happened thusly: it was a sunny dew-laden early summer morning when i went out to the garden, thinking i had my contacts in, checking out the noisy birds flitting around in the tree branches, squirrels chasing down the fence, shapes of clouds gracing the sky, everything in sharp detail. for years, i had been wearing contacts, even to bed, taking them out momentarily every 2 weeks to change for a new pair. after some eye irritation and a visit to the eye doc resulting in a recommendation to let my cornea's breathe for a couple weeks free of the contacts, i had taken them out and left them out the night before. being so used to waking up with them in, i had slap forgot that they Weren't in that morning. so i'm hearing a woodpecker over by the creek, and scanning the trees to see if i can spot him, when it suddenly dawned on me that my eyeballs were bare. and Instantly, i can't see a damn thing!! so how come i could see so well just a second ago?? this was just one of those unexplainable things that there's no use talking about. if it didn't happen to you, its going to be explained away somehow by anyone hearing it.

it was a couple years before this happened again, but i wasn't as shocked the second time. then as the years went by, it was happening more and more often. i had stopped wearing contacts to bed, wore them irregularly, switched them out for glasses at random times, and finally quit wearing them altogether. add to this is the issue of aging and memory irregularities, the dropping of non-essential-to-the-moment facts into the 50-something cracks of senior-citizenship, and now i'm often not consciously aware of my eyesight-correction status. so it happens quite a lot, really.

now one would argue that the clarity of one's eyesight is determined by bio-mechanical aspects of eye physiology, such as eyeball shape, health of the cornea and various component parts of the wonderful little orbs that allow us to translate physical data into images in our brains. and this is true. but my experience shows me that there is something else that allows us to see on a broader spectrum, a background sense of cognition/comprehension that isn't necessarily physical. intuitively, i know that it is the same process that allows me to See with such superb clarity while astral-traveling, when my physical eyeballs are surely resting in their rightly place inside their physical sockets, with the curtains closed tight. it is what allows me to See images inside my brain while dreaming. it is when my attention/focus suddenly shifts from this "something else" back into my physical eyeballs that i suddenly cannot see.

so yeah, i do think eyesight is all in your head, not withstanding weirdly curved and malfunctioning eyeballs.