Since my original post on terminal eyewear dependency drew an unusual amount of sympathetic response, here’s an update.

I am accustomed enough to corrective effects of the glasses that what bothers me now are the side effects. Most often this is light reflecting on the back side of the lens. One morning it took me a while to puzzle out what was casting the light pattern I was seeing. I realized I was getting a mirroring effect, and I was looking at my own eye, up closer than my own nose. It was a very translucent image so all I could really see was some dark lashes jutting from a higlight of pore-spotted skin, and a glimmer suggesting the pupil.

When I get these kinds of artifacts in my vision I jerk my glasses off in annoyance, looking to see what’s wrong with them, and I am usually startled when everything looks worse than before. I forget that the glasses are correcting my vision, not just collecting dandruff.

The two different focal lengths of my eyes produces a kind of double vision much like what you have after spinning around too much. (Well, too much is a matter of personal tastes. When I was younger I just couldn’t spin myself to the point of being unpleasantly dizzy, no matter how hard I tried. And then even if the world was lurching back and forth on short-cycle replay, I still wasn’t falling-down dizzy. It’s such a bummer when you can’t get that buzz the way you used to.) When I take of my glasses and look around suddenly, I will get a disoriented visual slosh. For the most part, though, I can switch between glasses and no glasses without significant perceptual confusion.