Glasses for Reading Lying Down: Better for TV Than Books

Holding your own head up is the kind of effort nobody notices until it runs out. One person in r/cfs had got there, and then a pair of glasses turned up.

I've been struggling with sitting up lately and it's taking a lot of effort to hold my head up, but now I can watch TV and play video games while lying completely flat! This has genuinely transformed the days I need to be lying down for hours and is making my lying down time a lot less boring.

u/twoonty, in r/cfs

They're sold as lazy glasses, prism glasses or bed specs. The Reiliva prism glasses are the kind owners in these threads describe: a plain frame with a small prism under each eye, worn lying on your back.

If sitting up is the hard part of a book or an evening of TV, they can be a real fix. That covers the neck that complains when you're propped up, the illness that keeps you flat for hours and the injury that means you can't sit up at all.

How do lazy glasses work?

They're mirrors, not lenses. A right-angle prism sits in front of each eye and bends your line of sight 90 degrees. With your head flat on the pillow and your eyes pointed at the ceiling, you see down the bed instead: the TV on the dresser, or a book propped on your chest. Easterseals, a disability charity, lists them for people with a spinal cord injury and anyone else who can't sit up in bed.

There's no prescription in them and they don't magnify, so whatever you needed to read before, you still need. They're made for lying flat, or with a slight pillow under your head. Sit up in them and you're looking at your lap.

Watching TV is what they do best

TV is where every report agrees. In r/ehlersdanlos, someone whose SI joint, where the spine meets the pelvis, was too sore to sit up bought a pair for exactly that. It let them lie on their back and easily see the TV.

The one independent write-up we found, Rob Beschizza's at Boing Boing in 2017, calls them perfect for watching TV in bed without craning your neck. His only problem was falling asleep.

They assume there's a TV at the foot of the bed to look at. If there isn't, or you'd rather have no screen in front of you at all, a projector on the ceiling is how the same threads solve it.

Reading, phones and laptops

Reading works for some owners and not others. One reads in bed with them and says they're not perfect, but they help with chronic neck tension. Now and then the book has to move a little to bring the bottom lines into view.

The SI-joint owner had less success with reading or a phone, and prefers a tablet stand and a page-turner remote for reading in bed.

A laptop is the surprise. Someone with flaring back and neck pain types fairly well fully reclined, after a minute to adjust.

Another used a pair at work for about a year, doing small, precise work with their hands while sitting very still. It helped their neck and shoulders. They work when you and the thing you're looking at both hold still. A TV does. A book in your hands doesn't, quite.

Can prism glasses make you nauseous?

For some people, and nearly always when they move. Three owners say the first minute or two feel strange, but lie still and your brain adapts quickly. The owner who wore them at work for a year says walking or moving with them on always made them feel sick, and calls the vertigo real.

In r/migraine, the thread starter is prone to vertigo during a migraine and was nervous about trying them. It took a little while, but they were pleasantly surprised, and they think the blacked-out sides on their pair, outside the mirrors, help.

Lazy glasses over regular glasses

If you wear glasses, the plain pair is a gamble. The owner quoted at the top wears glasses, and their pair is sold as going over them and mostly does. They'd also seen a clip-on kind that attaches to your own frames, which seemed to cost more. The person who started the migraine thread has a pair that doesn't work with glasses at all. The SI-joint owner's answer was an elastic band, with their distance glasses strapped to the outside of the lazy glasses.

So if you wear glasses, look for a pair sold as fitting over them, or the clip-on kind, and expect to fiddle. The elastic band is the free experiment.

Who should skip them

Anyone who wants to wear them anywhere but lying still. Anyone who only lies fully flat to go to sleep, too: one owner says the pair works well, but since the only time they lie all the way back is at bedtime, it doesn't get much use.

People also ask whether lazy glasses are bad for your eyes. We looked for a study or an optometrist's page on bed prism glasses and found none, either way. What exists is one hands-on report: the Boing Boing reviewer got tunnel vision, and more eye strain than usual, which he put down to the imperfect build of his pair.

Order the plain Reiliva pair and give it its first evening on the TV, flat on one pillow, not moving about. That's the use nobody reports failing, and the one that tells you soonest whether your brain takes to the mirrors.

Reading comes second, with the book propped on your chest and a nudge now and then for the bottom lines. Glasses wearers, try the elastic band before you spend more on a clip-on.