You could turn those dreams into reality-in less than 15 minutes. Just settle onto the surgical couch at an ophthalmologist 's office and let an incredibly precise excimer laser reshape your corneas. Then get up and experience a bright new world. At least that's what doctors -and, more important, their ecstatic patients-are saying about LASIK , or laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis.

Chances are you already know people who have had their eyes-in that newest of buzz verbs-lasered. For most people it works spectacularly:it corrected their vision to a very normal 20/20. Most of the rest still saw well enough to drive without corrective lenses. By 2010, some surgeons predict, LASIK will have advanced so far that 90% of patients will see better than 20/20.

Most patients aren't just happy with the results;they're positively gleeful. Only hours after his LASIK procedure last year, Michael Knorz, who says he was "quite blind" before the operation, knew the contact lenses he used to wear were superfluous. "I was sitting in an open-air restaurant on the beach, " he recalls, "and when I looked up at the sky I could see the stars clearly-just like that! It's a completely new life for me. " Knorz knows what he's talking about. As head of the German Commission for Refractive Laser Surgery, he introduced LASIK surgery to Germany in 1993. Since the German Ophthalmologic Society and the Professional Association of Oculists officially approved the method in June, the number of LASIK operations in the country has tripled from 2, 000 in the first half of 1999 to around 6, 000 in the second.

Now for the reality check. "LASIK is a surgical procedure with all the attendant risks of any surgical procedure "says Dr. Mark Mannis , a professor of opthalmology at the University of California at Davis, who has performed the operation on a weekly basis for the past four years. "It is highly successful in the vast majority of well-chosen cases, but"-and here you have to pay close cases, but"-and here you have to pay close attention - "each of those words I said is very important. "The best candidates, he emphasizes, are those adults whose sight is only moderately distorted, whose vision is stable and who have no other eye problems. Even so, complications occur that can't always be corrected.

It's also important to realize that 20/20 vision isn't synonymous with perfect eye sight. The standart eye chart measures vision under conditions in which contrast is high. But there are other factors, like how well you see in dim light or discriminate among various shades of gray, that help determine the overall quality of your vision and that can be adversely affected by LASIK.