The Aspen Experiments

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 - Vision Test

The next day, in a room adjacent to the doctor's office, I sat in an optometrist’s chair watching Dr. Shammas fiddle with the projector and the white screen hanging on the wall. Large loops of neon yellow strapping material hung on the wall behind me. They looked like the straps EMT's use to keep people on a gurney.  The room was large, and there were a lot of cables snaking along both sides of the room and disappearing into the walls at regular intervals. There was even a rolling hospital bed stashed in a corner. When I asked about it, Dr. Shammas grumbled about "the school's storage problem." I let it drop. There was sitar music playing very quietly.

"These sensors,” he pointed to four small black boxes protruding from the ceiling,“catalog eye movement, conscious and unconscious, and help us see how your eyes respond, compared to the norm.”  He walked to the door and flipped the light switch. The room got very dark, there were no windows. The only light was from the tiny hourglass on the screen.

“Now, this is a new method of testing for vision impairment, totally automatic. Just watch the pictures as they appear, let your eye focus on whatever part they're drawn to."

“Wait,” I said, trying to sound casual, “you said ‘unconscious’ movement – do you mean I’m supposed to go to sleep?” Or pass out?

“No, no,” he said. I jumped when I heard him. He was closer than I thought. He spoke very  patiently, humoring me. “Some movement is under your conscious control, when you look at a person’s eyes and then their hands, for example. But the eye is constantly twitching, so rapidly that your brain compensates without you knowing it. That movement is ‘unconscious,’ in the sense that you are not controlling it. We’ll measure both types to determine how your eyes are doing. Just relax, it takes a little while.”

He left the room then, and I tried to relax. Maybe my eyes were going bad. I’d certainly felt different the last six weeks, maybe it was more than one weird allergy to a classmate.  

The photographs were simple. I wasn’t sure what the point was. A skyscraper against a bright blue sky, an orange butterfly, a truck, a house, a horse and buggy, a meadow, a castle. The images stayed long enough for me to see them in their entirety, but before I could count windows or examine shapes.  I felt a little uneasy at first but slowly relaxed. It was hard to stay keyed up with the images fading smoothly along, in a sort of mesmerizing way. I decided to lean back and enjoy the show.

The pictures flipped slower and slower.  My eyes felt heavy and I noticed I was seeing the pictures through barely opened slits. I straightened up and opened my eyes, but still felt drowsy. The walls were getting closer to me. I could see the screen, but a tunnel stretched from my head to the pictures. Nothing else in the room registered. In fact, and now I exerted myself to look around, I did see a tunnel. I didn’t see the large, institutional grey walls and cabinets of the exam room, I saw this narrow tunnel, stretching away from me. It was blueish purple, but indistinct, like I saw it through the snow of an old TV.

I tried to rub my eyes. To push the illusion away from me. I couldn’t see my arms. That was alarming.

The tunnel got clearer and clearer, the pictures disappearing. What kind of trippy test was this?

I tried again to push it away. The two outer walls of the tunnel buckled outward at my hands. They rippled like water, but resisted my touch. I pushed again, with my hands, or maybe my mind, and the tunnel buckled outward again, rippling into a thousand facets, like I was inside a crystal or a diamond.

It was beautiful, but frightening. My body was so lethargic I could hardly feel it, and I tried to cling to the sensation in my fingers. The tunnel sloped downward and if I didn't get a hold on something I would slide right down it. But I'm not really here, I reminded myself. Gosh, I was really lucid considering the level of hallucination around me.