I hope my manager would forgive me for spending so much time at work writing these notes, but I will regret if I don't document it all very thoroughly, since I may not be able to recall those things even with some notes that I took yesterday so I don't forget anything important.
As I was walking and looking at things, I noticed more and more. I was not reallying trying to feel volume like I was a few days before by intersecting two huge spheres in space and seeing volume in the intersection, as I already described in a post on spherical mirrors. I was not even trying to consciously look at the surface of the objects, which I also did for one or two evenings after realizing it was helpful (see one of my previous posts). Instead, since I was still leading with my right eye, just looking and feeling the eye relatively awake because of night vision was good enough, even if it was not really night vision because of the street lamps. For example, I would stop and look up at a tree. Now I had a much more direct experience that the crown of the tree was above me. I would look and sometimes see two or three layers of leaves. I was still not sure if it was interpretation, but interpretation seemed like also a good thing to learn.
After all, I was thinking, if the binocular experience is mostly habit and interpretation, let me learn to do this interpretation, and then I can do pretty good even without catching balls or measuring distances well. If it is not just interpretation, then I must be learning the real thing, since I see all though things that I notice, and some are quite singular, as I already described, like being taller than a taxi.
At some point a thought about eye exercises crossed my mind. I was probably still feeling this "stetch" around my right eye. The muscles in the eyes were eager to move so new information can come in. I figured eye exercises were not such a bad thing. So I made a few circles with each eye in both directions, trying to make large, sweeping circles, really accessing the boundaries of the visual field. The tendency for the head was to move with the eyes, not to isolate the eyes. When I tried to only move the eyes, not the head, it actually again felt good, like a good stretch, whereas when I tried such things years ago, it would only bring more strain.
It was particularly interesting to move, for example, the left eye around its rightmost positions, with the right eye open, and seeing or tracing in space the boundary of what is seen by the left eye (and hence by both eyes), separating things only accessible to the right eye. This was somewhat similar to what I described in the post on spherical mirrors. I also took care to close one eye at a time and to trace the inside boundary with the other eye, just in case there was some part of either retina habitually suppressed by the other eye.
During the eye exercises I felt how difficult it was to move an eye in a circle. I realized that if my eyes were so uncoordinated, no wonder they couldn't both track an object at the same time - I had so much trouble even with one eye at a time.
A little later I noticed that when I was shifting my gaze, I was doing it along a straight segment connecting both points. As soon as I noticed it, I could change it. The new experience was like I was shooting a straight ray forward until it contacted the building, and as I was turning, I was shooting at different points on the building and other objects. I realized that this is what Bates meant by shifting, and that my previous idea of shifting could only bring more strain. I also realized that actual shooting, for example, for military applications, strongly benefited from depth perception.
It occurred to me that I could shift in other ways, not just horizontally. So I practiced shifting or flying from window to window, between the buildings on the opposite sides of the street. I realized at some point that if I wanted to look into a window to see what's inside, some positions on the ground were better for me than the others.
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