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Edit: I typed an essay here... sorry...

In response to your question, I am an electrical engineering student with a deep seated interest in biology. How I came about to finding all this interesting information is a story in itself. It involves how I changed my way of thinking one day. I knew what was important before picking up knowledge is knowing how to reason clearly. What I did was I studied the writings of several ancient Greek philosophers; in doing so, I discovered why Aristotle, whose influence on Western thought has been so great as to be almost incomprehensible, was able to make all his discoveries (he wrote 170+ books). Aristotle had an interest in every single thing in the planet, no matter how boring or disgusting it would have appeared. Such is the antidote for ignorance, I realized.

I engaged in a comprehensive study of how the sensory organs of all organisms function, even at the cellular level - and in doing so, I was able to better understand the nature of man. This helped me to understand how man perceives with his senses. i.e. we perceive only what is important to our lives, just as other creatures perceive what is important to their lives. For example, a toad is interested in only "moving" flies as its dinner, but will starve itself to death if there are many dead and "still" flies lying around. Therefore it makes sense in saying that the more interest one takes in any given thing regardless of its nature, the more one can perceive and learn how to correctly react in a given environment. We wouldn't end up dead or harmed by ignorance like that toad who couldn't perceive.

It was only after understanding these very important concepts that I set out to understand more about the world around me. I did not want to end up with distorted data in my head, from some inability to reason clearly. I knew what it was like to reason clearly at one time. It goes all the way back to when I was a four-year-old child. I could learn so fast that my pre-school teacher told my parents she had never, in all her years of teaching, ever seen a kid learn that fast. I had somewhere like 30/10 eyesight, which is very close to telescopic vision. It took only one glance, and something was already commited to memory. I can still remember, to this day, being able to count all the small stars within galaxies and star clusters in the night sky.

With such a background, I already knew how important sight is to one's learning and mental facilities. That is why, when I first read Bates' writings, it made a lot of sense to me. He had discovered a proportional relationship between sight and the mental facilities (including learning, memory, and so on). But shortly after that, I experienced a lot of trauma upon entering elementary school, such as my dad starting to use the belt to beat me (even at five years old), my parents getting into fights, and eventually divorcing; moving away from my best friend. It was a painful time and my eyesight rapidly deteriorated and I was already photophobic (light-sensitive) and wearing glasses by the time I was 10 years old. So sensitive were my eyes to light that many of my assignments were printed on colored paper instead of white paper, and my glasses were photochromatic (auto-darkening).

I began having trouble learning, and my scholastic performance suffered after fifth grade. No one could figure it out -- I lacked interest in learning. I did not eat with the other children, I always sat by myself at the lunch table all the way up to ninth grade. Bates wrote about schoolchildren's performance and social interaction suffering due to problems with their eyes and the irrational educational system at his time, and everything seemed so identical to my problems. He wrote often in support of Montessori, who designed an educational system to stimulate children's interest. He illustrated, "When one is not interested, in short, one's mind is not under control, and without mental control one can neither learn nor see."

After learning from the ancient Greek philosophers how to reason clearly, I scoured dozens of books and scientific articles covering numerous scientific fields. It was at this time I became interested in natural vision improvement, and upon looking the subject up, discovered a hidden history of suppressed discoveries - it blew my mind the more I read... I learned extensively how wrong conclusions had been arrived at by so many scientists, and exactly how it could be demonstrated to be diametrically opposite. I learned how Helmholtz had only given the "character of probability" to his theory of accommodation, but how his followers according to Tscherning had "proclaimed as certain what he himself with much reserve explained as probable" and they soon put it in the textbooks as if it were to be treated like a fact, and several 'facts' were built upon that theory for the next 150 years (and still counting). This theory prevents discoveries for the true cause of all sorts of visual disturbances and errors - and therefore cures are thought impossible.

Everything Bates wrote made perfect sense with my experiences, more than anything I had ever read. I began studying all the published scientific articles, book, and magazines by Bates I could get my hands on. I observed discussions at several forums and read through publicly available ophthalmology and optometrist courses (for students) from some top-tier universities, including teacher-student discussions and manuals, learning their understanding in general.

It was then one day I ran across two extremely intelligent individuals. One was a gentleman who studied at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard. The other was a woman by the name of Elena - I have encountered many very intelligent people (Ivy students), even had friends who made perfect SAT and SAT II scores, but never, ever seen anything like her. The gentleman was well-acquainted with Elena, and he was equally astonished by this Russian scientific technical writer who was so difficult for everyone to keep up with. Her thoughts were very sharp, always zigzagging, with concepts connecting so perfectly each time. After she left, he wrote these things about her:

For a period of more than a decade we had on this and
the other NVI websites a woman possessed of the most
brilliant mind I have ever encountered on any website.
Her name was Elena. She was, in fact, the source of the
first posting [at sci.med.vision] which elicited Dr.
Durasov's posting. . . .

She earned a Master of Science degree in one of the
hard sciences. She never mentioned what it was, but I
suspect it was biochemistry.

Her last job in Russia was as a technical writer. She
knew how to study. When she got interested in vision,
she cleaned out all the local libraries for any book
having anything to do with vision and plowed through
them all. In her last posting, she listed all the subjects
she had looked into and, quite frankly, I had never even
heard of most of them. (This was after she came to the
USA.)
. . . . . .
She had an extremely wide-ranging knowledge
of modern, cutting-edge science as applied to vision,
combined with a deep understanding of how the human
mind works. She was in every way dazzling, and her
discussions of the usual questions of the etiology of
myopia, axial elongation, etc., were exhaustive and
definitive.
. . . . . .
She became very ill with the flu when she was
13 years old, and found herself a minus 3 diopter
myope and robbed of her photographic memory
when she recovered. Influenza can lead to myopia
in 15% of cases she later reported. Her whole
personality then changed, and she became very
feminine and submissive and more interested in
being popular and accepted.

She descended to 8 1/2 diopters of myopia as the
years went by. At one time she was thinking of having
her eyes operated on by the famous Russian eye
surgeon (forget his name) who did radial cuts in
the cornea, the first crude form of refractive surgery.
He had a team of surgeons doing these operations
on an assembly-line basis in Moscow. She thanks
her lucky stars that she didn't submit to this butchery,
which is what she now calls it.

It was after she came to America that she heard
of Dr. Bates. She made very rapid progress. In
about nine months she was seeing 20/20 and
better. She was so devoted to Bates that she
was thinking of writing a book about him
(I wish she had).

This gentleman's posts were the "lead" I needed for someone worthwhile to study. I made the decision to study Elena's case, and went through more than 500 of her posts. In them, I learned many new "leads" which I cross-checked to make sure they were correct and nearly all of it was correct. I tend to cross-check different sources more than 10 times before arriving at a conclusion about most things. Elena's posts were one way I was able to learn about things most people are not aware of, such as the first U.S. astronauts being able to see much better in outer space due to increased saccadic eye movements.

By cross-checking her posts, I was able to collect supporting evidence from scientific publications. By carefully observing how she had obtained such information, the way I had studied the ancient Greeks' writings to deduce how true logic works, I also absorbed her ability to seek out spectacular sources of information.

Here is an example of what Elena sounded like:

I saw an episode on TV a couple of years ago where some psychologists
were experimenting on children (sic), trying to determine at what age
children learn to lie. Here's what they did: they were giving a few
groups of children of different ages some chocolates, and all the
children were instructed to say, WHILE THEY WERE EATING, that they
loved the sweet taste of these chocolates, and to smile happily. The
catch was that those experimental chocolates were not sweet -- they
looked like ordinary chocolates but were actually completely bitter,
no sweetness at all, just pure bitterness. (The anchor's aside to the
viewers of the program was that she tried them herself and they were
totally disgusting.)

The children in all age groups managed to get the words out -- they
all said that they loved the sweet taste. But while older children
did manage to smile and nod and make a fairly convincing happy face,
younger children proved physically unable to lie with their facial
muscles. They were saying, with great effort, "I love the sweet taste
of these chocolates" while their faces were involuntarily contorting
into tortured grimaces of disgust, disappointment, suffering -- i.e.
telling the truth!

When we grow old enough to be physically able to lie on demand about
what we feel (and this is how we learn to lie about our feelings in
all instances: ON DEMAND), the only way to make those lies believable
is to suppress the actual muscular action that could, and would,
betray our true feelings if allowed to RELAX, i.e. MATCH THE ACTUAL
FEELING WITH THE APPROPRIATE MUSCULAR ACTION. This is the major
point people don't understand about relaxation. Relaxed is not a
state of kicking back physically or mentally; relaxed is a state from
which the tension of being different in one's muscles from the way one
is in one's soul has been removed. "Relaxed" is a match between the
truth of the body and the truth of the mind, soul, and heart. A
mismatch between these is what tension is. It's ALL tension is.

She also mentioned elsewhere having a perfect photographic memory as a kid:

Myopia does horrendous things to visual memory. This one I happen to
know for sure, because I had photographic memory as a kid, up to age
13 when I developed myopia. It was quite spectacular -- I remember my
parents having fun with me by asking me to read a page from a book on
quantum dynamics when I was four years old (I started reading at three
and a half) and then recite it word for word, after only one reading.
I didn't understand even one word on the page of course, but I could
reproduce it with no difficulty -- photographic memory literally means
I could take a snapshot of anything I looked at and have it in my mind
forever. To this day, I remember exactly the color of the eyes of
each and every person I'd ever seen before I became myopic, and far as
my kindergarten classmates are concerned, e.g., I could paint the
exact shade of everyone's eyecolor (not just blue, e.g., but light
blue or blue-gray or blue with specks of hazel) even now, forty years
later. Obviously, school was the easiest thing in the world -- to
"memorize" something I had to just look at it. Homework (unless it
was something written) usually took as much as a full five minutes --
but often no more than a few seconds.

All this was similar to me when I was a child -- except her eyesight was perfect (telescopic) and mine wasn't.

At least now you can see how I get my all my information... much of what I know about how the normal eye really works comes directly from Bates' scientifically published articles, book, and magazines, but other sources include Elena (a scientific journalist while living in Russia), other scholars, ODs, research papers from Google Scholar and PubMed and other sources, several textbooks on all subjects imaginable out there, forums, libraries, etc.

Regarding your symptoms: I used to see a sparkle (or a very bright shiny dot suddenly pop up in the air for a second or two) nearly daily. It was triggered only when my eyes felt very strained, but never when my eyes felt relaxed (even in the same day). It took me a little while to relax my eyes, but after a few weeks of palming and using my eyes correctly it stopped completely, and has not appeared in months. Relaxation using what Bates taught did the job pretty well.

I am not certain why you are having the accommodation problems but it could have to do with whatever happened in your sleep the night previously. This is something most doctors might overlook. Symptoms suddenly appearing one day and going away the next few weeks? That suggests something did happen during the night to trigger it.

Let me relate a similar incident so you understand what I'm getting at. In the case of writer's cramp, which every scientist out there today is still searching for a cure, Dr. Bates related the following: "About the symptoms the most astonishingly contradictory statements are made, and upon these contradictory observations contradictory theories are based."

Scientists today are still building upon the exact same contradictary theories Bates had mentioned back in his time. The cure was so simple he was afraid to publish it because he knew it would be met with resentment. Some of his patients, upon being cured, were very angry that the other doctors hadn't been able to diagnose such a simple cause. The problem, Bates discovered, had to do with how they were sleeping on their hands or arms at night. In only one night of stopping doing this, they were cured permanently. Writer's Cramp: Its Cause and Cure

Maybe the night before you had accommodation problems, you had a bad dream (unconscious or conscious) that created fear, in turn producing the stare and immense strain (which always leads to vision problems). Or you slept on your eye somehow the wrong way. Or you had a brief episode of sleep apnea, in which lack of oxygen may produce eyestrain. It could be that simple. Maybe not.

Thanks for asking and you're welcome.