I had spent my life in dreams. My feelings and thoughts were very loud, calling me to pay more attention to them than to objective reality. My vision was ensouled - my abstract perceptions, my emotional thoughts were also visual perceptions. My feelings were alive in my vision, as small almost-hallucinations, as if my vision were permeated with something transparent that moved and sometimes formed shapes that were feelings. Out on walks, I had an unpleasant, compulsive fascination with graphics, posted announcements, art - as if there might be something very interesting, or it was something I needed to see - but I was annoyed to have to look, too. I was very tense; little things would upset me a lot and my back would get terribly tense, and I could only relax after hours in a hot bath. My mind translated the muscle tension as rage, and I was angry a lot of the time. I had spells of despair, I would cry and cry and wonder if my life was ever going to get any better. I felt like killing myself, often. I had a waiting room in my mind, where my words would have to sit in a state of unease before I let them out of my mouth.

When I finally quit gluten and the other foods, after half a lifetime, it was as if I'd had a tree growing in my mind, with its roots tangled everywhere, and it was pulled out. I could FEEL that my mind was fundamentally changing.

It was a giant relief from anxiety. I don't have to forge through a crystallized cloud of anxiety, that chattering static of anxiety that used to be around me all the time, to do little things. My words glide out as if they were slipping out of my mind, past the little mental hands I used to parcel out my words with. I don't control my actions as much either. I'm more stable, because the world isn't always coming in and exciting me emotionally - so now I look for stimulation in the outside world. My vision is just vision, less interesting than when it was so decorated with my feelings. My "deep" rage, my simmering unfocused anger, vanished as if someone had waved a wand at it. I let go of resentments more than I used to; I've been able to do things I couldn't before, because I accept that bad things might happen. I'm not as vulnerable - my new calmness shields me. I'm much more realistic. My despair went away. I'm sure that wasn't just because I had found answers, because I only stopped having those terrible spells of crying despair after 2005, when I found more food intolerances that had been hidden.

It hurts less to be alive, now. The food intolerances caused me psychic - pain - so that I tried to get vicarious satisfaction from other people's pleasures. I was horribly abused as a child, and I thought this was the explanation of all my problems before I found my food intolerances. An ex-boyfriend used to tell me that I was wrong to think my pain was so much worse than other people's - but I know that was a true perception, because although I'm still an abuse survivor, it hurts much less than it did. Some of the power that the abuse had to limit my life, the dark, hating demon-souls of my parents that occupied my mind, the primitive voltage of their gaze, turned out to be gluten-caused hypersensitivity. I can enjoy math and physics more or less in peace, even though my father taught them to me with screaming and raging insults, because my memories are quieter now. I used to feel like a Martian, like a visitor to this planet, a stranger drifting through the human race. And that was also true. I really was different. My consciousness was different from other people's. I feel like a person, now. I'm less a bare wire, needily wanting contact and comfort from people, yet over and over struck by flashes of hostility, like a lightning-charred tree.

Hypersensitivity, dreaminess, feelings infused with vision, vision infused with feelings, the past very close to the present - all could have the same cause. Maybe food intolerance causes neurotransmitters to change so that there's more communication inside one's brain.

I also got more alert, more "with it", quicker. My chronic slight fog lifted. I used to see people through the picture I had of how they ought to act, which was based on my emotional needs. Now I realize I'm interacting with social, emotional creatures: subjective, clothed apes.

Other people have written to me about similar experiences.