The Circus Leaves Town

Dueling Vision © 2026 Craig Dahlberg

I was a young lad when I first felt the rumble of a lion’s roar, heard an elephant’s shrill trumpeting, or felt the sudden plunge of a circus acrobat.

Yet every day now, I see acrobats. A woman stands atop her own head. A soccer team competes against an identical, mirrored team. Four dogs chase four tails—or is it two dogs chasing two tails? Body parts float away. Walls disassemble like Lego bricks.

Like the blind man before being healed by Jesus, I see “men as trees, walking.”

I have double vision.

A year ago, my befuddled brain quit deciphering my uncorrelated dual visual images. Double vision—diplopia—took over my world.

I close one eye to read a book or negotiate a computer screen. Navigating a Los Angeles freeway is harder than driving bumper cars blindfolded.

What is real? How do I know that what I perceive is trustworthy?

Only two surgeons in Los Angeles perform the corrective surgery I needed. But a year of fighting procedures, policies, schedules, and insurance left me weary. Hope stayed far from my house.

When I finally arrived at UCLA’s Stein Eye Institute, anxiety wrestled with joyful expectation. Several weeks earlier, my dry eye specialist—not my double vision specialist—had concocted a best-guess eyeglass prescription for my double vision.

“Do you want to try glasses?” she had asked me. “If they work, you might be able to avoid surgery. But if not…”

Knowing double vision was not her specialty, I dutifully, yet doubtfully, followed the dry eye specialist’s suggestion and ordered the glasses. I doubted they would help.

Weeks later, when I finally arrived at my appointment with the UCLA double vision specialist, the doctor’s young assistant took over.

“Okay, follow my finger with your eyes.”

I followed the assistant’s finger up, down, left, right, then into each quadrant. Next came goggles, prisms, and eventually a test using a machine built in the 1930s, one of only two in the country. Popsicle sticks moved the examination slides into their proper places. By then the examination itself was beginning to feel like another circus act.

At the end of my three-hour exam, bloodshot, bleary-eyed, and twisted with emotion, I awaited the pronouncement by my double vision doctor.

And what about that long-shot prescription I had been given by the dry eye specialist several weeks ago? Double vision was not her expertise. But could her guess at a prescription really have been a fix? Or was it only a tease?

My UCLA doctor’s pronouncement came in a thick Scottish brogue. What would he say about my double vision?

“Well, Craig, you’ve probably had this condition for several decades. Previously, your brain adjusted to it, but it has stopped cooperating. Fortunately for you, it is now stable and will not worsen.”

“And by the way, however she created it, that prescription you received from your dry eye specialist is perfect! Yes, you will need to wear glasses. And that’s the end of it. You don’t need surgery.” Then he smiled, “And you don’t need to see me anymore!”

I sat staring at him, trying to find the words.

Finally, my tightened throat gave way to words. “This is one of the best days of my life.”

He was clearly taken aback.

I continued, as I wiped tears from my eyes.

“It’s been a tough year. A year ago, I began battling for my eyesight. And then I lost my wife in February. But I feel like this is Christmas. I’ve received a wonderful gift. So that makes you Santa … minus the white hair and beard.”

The three-hour trip home through L.A. rush-hour traffic flew by. I barely noticed the accident in the lane beside me. I averaged twenty miles an hour. None of it mattered.

Now, when I remove my glasses at night, the circus still returns. Acrobats tumble. Images split apart. Words climb over one another. But in the morning, my new glasses end the performance. Calm prevails.

Double vision has proven to be a good teacher.

It has taught me that life itself can be illusory. What appears real may not be. What seems worth reaching for may leave me grasping at air.

So I keep on asking: Am I reaching toward what is real, or toward an illusion? Am I pursuing a misleading goal, or one of lasting value?

While the circus hasn’t fully left town, double vision no longer occupies the center ring. And what’s a circus without the main attraction?