Sleeping on one side and double-vision

The experience one gets from sleeping on one side of the face the whole night is a disconcerting albeit temporary case of double-vision when one wakes up. This is attributed to the slight misalignment of the eye. However, the body usually recognises this problem and restores balance in a blink of an eye, literally - I apologise for the pun. A similar but worse situation is when that double vision occurs not from two eyes out-of-sync but in one eye alone, no thanks to the slight swelling of eye tissue, being a result of Grave’s Disease. Sadly to say, this condition isn’t as temporary as the first case mentioned and I can attest to this from personal experience. You know the line from the Book of Corinthians that says that as we grow up we see through a glass darkly? Well I see now not just darkly (at least that’s what I think) but doubly too (ouch that was so not funny). Thankfully, only one eye is afflicted so with both eyes I can still read and see things almost the way they should be seen.

I must clarify that last sentence however. When I say “should be seen” I mean it in comparison to the way I used to see things, minus the philosophical “darkly” musings. Putting back philosophy into the equation, things get a little more complicated because defining what is the normal way is really a matter of opinion. Maybe I was destined to see the way I see things now, and the way I used to see things was really the abnormal way - only the abnormal way came first and I got too comfortable with it that I thought it normal. Taking this further, it occurred to me that even if my eyesight was considered normal (sans myopia, which is another ‘abnormal’ condition that is so common in Singapore that it is almost normal) before my hyperthyroid problems, the way I see colours and objects are probably different from the way another sees the same thing simply because we own different brains. Statistically, my vision is the supposed abnormal one while the rest of the people who see in single vision are normal, yet there is no way to prove, for instance, that the colour of the sky a Normal sees is exactly the same as that of another Normal, who looks at the exact same spot. Of course I’m really quite stupid, so someone tell me if I am wrong to assume so. And please leave metaphysics out of the explanation (no transposing of souls into separate bodies thank you. No Being John Malkovich nonsense if you please.)

And this brings me to my philosophical conclusions of the day. That anything can be normal or abnormal depending on how we compare things to our own personal experiences. Of course this is something I realised way before my thyroid problems but I just felt I needed an excuse to justify and lessen the I’m-such-a-freak feeling that I’ve been having since the visions started (haha).

For self-amusement, let me for this last paragraph, assume that single is normal and double is abnormal: Recently I’ve been quite addicted to Hong Kong cinema as some people around me have noticed. And I read this essay on Wong Kar Wai movies (I think it was David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong but I can’t be sure) that describes the famous auteur as being notable for travestying famous and gorgeous actors. I just thought to myself, wow, then every movie that I’ve watched in recent times could be a homage to Wong Kar Wai because every face I see comes with faint one or two extra eyes.

Okay I lied about the last paragraph being the last paragraph. This real last is an apology to myself for the previous four sections of crap. It’s four twenty-five in the morning as I write this and my brain is a bit scrambled up at the moment. I think I will cringe when I read this when I am more awake and saner, but of course that saner bit will be a matter of opinion, something that many of my friends will probably argue against.

Subjects: General, Film, Television & Anime 映像

Mood: Philosophical Musings

Tags: Corinthians, eye, Grave's Disease, Hong Kong, hyperthyroid, vision, Wong Kar Wai