I've noticed quite a bit of improvement in the past few days. I'm noticing my eyes are coming together, and it's increasingly the case that my double images are on top of each other and that this has practical benefits: it makes reading and watching TV more enjoyable and less distracting.
I'm not doing 'vision therapy' and haven't been for a number of months now. The reason is because I think I've learned the important lessons from vision therapy and I'm able to use what I've learned from those lessons all of the time now.
One training technique I've been using a lot lately is actually reading books on my iPad. I use a reading technique that I learned from Tim Ferriss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwEquW_Yij0
In this video, Tim Ferriss explains how to speed read. And actually he says that most people are never taught how to read properly, which is a bit bold, but I think he has a good point. The key to speed reading (and reading properly) is to minimize the number of saccades (or jumps) of the eye while reading by skipping the margins. The fewer saccades you make, the faster you read.
This can be demonstrated with a program called 'Spreeder'. The idea is that the program flashes words at you in the same spot, one word after another, really quickly. This way, you don't have to move your eyes at all. Automatically you find yourself reading much more quickly than at your base rate--all by eliminating saccades.
Tim explains that the way that you decrease the number of saccades you make per line of text is by training your peripheral vision. Don't begin each line at the beginning. Start an inch to the right of the margin. Also don't finish the line of text at the end. Stop an inch to the left of the end. Over time, Tim explains that you can skip more and more of the margins (up to two inches from each side) to further reduce the number of saccades.
I found this awkward at first because my peripheral vision isn't so great. This is particularly true for my left eye because that's my weak eye. It was slow and awkward at first because I would deliberately be looking around the periphery to build the strength in the eye. So I was actually reading slower than my normal method (which involves the use of only one eye, actually).
But the more I practiced reading this way, alternating eyes from left to right, and trying to minimize my saccades (I can do about two per line now), and really feeling around my periphery, I've gotten quite a bit quicker. And my left eye seems to have gotten quite a bit stronger, and the peripheral vision better.
Today I had a weird sensation that things suddenly looked really, really big and bright with that eye--much more than usual. That is still the case. I also suddenly noticed space between my couch and the side table. It was pretty cool. I also noticed quite a bit more space while playing VR today.
So things are looking peachy. I still don't have stereopsis (some sort of low-level stereopsis). But it seems like the eye is really beginning to come online, and it has a lot to do with the fact that I've been really training my peripheral vision with both eyes with this new reading technique. I still have double vision, but it's not that distracting.
At this point, I would say that vision therapy has been a success. It seems I've jumped the hurdle when vision therapy caused my eye to significantly decrease suppression without having full control over the eye. This is an awkward phase in vision therapy as I've learned because it's like you're stuck with what can be crippling double vision. At least before vision therapy, I didn't have bad double vision because I was suppressing so much. But there can be a phase when the suppression significantly decreases without the control and so you're stuck with really distracting double vision. I seem to have gotten over that. I have sufficient control of the eyes so that fact that the eyes are both really turned on now means it isn't such a problem that it was.
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