The effects that gluten had on my brain were disturbing and far reaching.

For me, waking up from a deep sleep used to be supremely disquieting. As I began the initial climb back to consciousness, I would be immersed in a dream, surrounded by a nighttime fantasy. But as I awoke further, and became more fully conscious, the memory of that dream would drain away - sometimes in torturous slow motion. Something circulating in my brain, or some warped circuit in my skull, would grab my dream memory and pull it slowly from my grasp no matter how hard I tried to keep it in mind. By the time the process was done, and I was fully awake, I was only left with the thin knowledge that I had had a dream. I couldn't recall where I had been or what I had done.

On other mornings I would vaguely remember that the people in my dream were people that I somehow knew while I was asleep but who were strangers to me when I tried to think about them while awake. I had the disturbing feeling that I had known them in some other life that was unavailable to me. The line between sleeping and wakefulness was becoming a broader and broader border that was becoming more difficult to cross. I felt as though my dreaming and waking consciousnesses were being torn from each other. They were each on separate journeys that were drifting further and further apart.

At around the same time that my dream life was suffering, I began to have severe memory problems that made me think I was entering early Alzheimer's. In a desperate attempt to save my brain from dementia, one of the things I tried was to give up gluten figuring I had little to lose. To my delight, going gluten free saved my brain and nerves. Within two weeks of giving up gluten, friends and family noticed a significant improvement in how I functioned. (My mood improved too!)

But I also found that, as an added bonus, giving up wheat, barley and foods with gluten (bread, pizza, beer, cookies, cakes, pies, etc) reunited my dreaming and waking selves. Dreams were no long taken from me. I could clearly recall what happened at night.

Since then, I have experienced a kind of reunification of self. I don't feel as though there are mysterious strangers running around inside my head.

Recently, while watching the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," I was struck by the line toward the end of the film where Benjamin, suffering from Alzheimer's, says "It's like there's this whole life I had and I can't remember what it was..." When I heard that line, I knew what exactly what he meant. That was the land of forgetfulness that I was entering when going gluten free pulled me back.

Note: In previous posts, I referred to celiac, the auto-immune disorder that makes you gluten intolerant, as a gluten allergy. I was wrong. It is not an allergy. In my case, gluten acts in my body as a neuro-toxin and also causes a cascade of other difficulties that are not allergic reactions.