#5 session

There's not a lot to say.  It was a decent session.  The only thing notable to mention is the hypertropia, which is still there, but pretty controllable.  The left-side image wants to go down, because my left eye wants to go up.  So I consciously push the eyeball downward, causing the image to go up.  Then it drifts back down, and the conscious control mechanism causes it to sort of jerk back up.  It then slowly drifts back down, and the conscious control mechanism jerks the image back up.  That's how I keep both images level.  They're never able to stay on top of one another in a completely stable way.  This is probably because you cannot consciously make smooth eye movements unless you are tracking something.

That said, morale is high, even though the exercise is no longer painful or challenging.  I'm just going to do the month long course, and report on its effectiveness.

Immediately after the light tube, I did eight minutes of saccades.  I'm surprised by how much better I'm getting at that.  The main thing I pay attention to when doing the saccades is what the lazy-eye image is doing.  It's just getting quicker and more accurate.  Often when I saccade to the target, it saccades right on the target and there's no requirement for adjustment.  Most of the time I do have to adjust and it the lazy-eye image has to drift into place.  But it's getting much better.

Lately I've been consciously trying to make the shift in thinking of myself as a consciousness behind my right eye, to a consciousness between my two eyes.  I've never heard of this being mentioned in any kind of vision therapy or by my old vision therapist, but it makes sense to me that this should be something to focus on.  This is because people who have normal stereoscopic vision are a consciousness between the two eyes.  It seems to me that making the leap from a strabismic to a visually normal person requires this change in thinking.  So if you can perhaps visualize yourself as a consciousness distributed over two eyes during the day or during exercises, this should be helpful in developing stereo function.  If there's one thing that's occurred to me during this VT experience, it's that vision and thinking are very tightly connected.  Developing stereopsis requires breaking habits, and old ways of thinking, and I believe it's possible that developing stereopsis is so difficult for so many people because habits are tough to break.

That said, even though this is a realization I've come to on my own, it's a line of thinking that I'm going to pursue.