Whenever Ben slept, he'd dream with two eyes and get all his vision back. Then, each time he awoke, he'd have to transition again from seeing normally to half the world dark. "Sometimes the world doesn't seem quite real," he says. "It's like there is a blackness behind it. It is flat, lacks depth, and the colors are a little wrong because of the black overlay."
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Which is starting to get into The Mamas & The Papas territory, lyrically.
That happens when his brain is trying to process non-visual non-signals from the non-eye. If you're an idiot like us, you probably think of eyes as little more than convenient skull holes that you can see through. Turns out your nervous system is a bit more complicated than that. The eyes code light into electric signals and transmit them along wire-like nerves to a part of the brain all the way in the back of the head. Also, the image they send is upside-down, but you imagine it right-side-up and centered in front of your face, because you're super arrogant and you think the world is all about you.
That means losing an eye isn't quite like losing a hand: The whole system freaks out. Your field of vision gets chopped short and pushed off-center. But your brain compensates in all kinds of weird-ass ways, like stretching images to fill in the reduced field of vision, sometimes even making square objects look rectangular. In Ben's case, losing an eye came with the jarring sensation that his good eye had migrated to the middle of his forehead.
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
It's a well-documented phenomenon.
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