Irlen Lenses
Here is a diary, telling the story of my Irlen lenses.
According to Roger Wheaton (Irlen expert), the famous colored glasses of Whoopi Goldberg, Elton John, and Ozzy Osborne are in fact Irlen lenses.
So I have at last saved up the money to buy my Irlen Lenses. Here is my diary of how it came about:
The nearest Irlen Practitioner is in Albuquerque. I sent them an E-mail:
"I have Asperger's Syndrome and Dyslexia; i.e., Sensory Processing Disorders. When I look at a printed page, I see rivers of white running down it. Punctuation marks are blurred-out by the overwhelming white. I cannot go out in sunlight without my brown anti-glare filters over my glasses that already turn dark in the sun. I broke a lens on my glasses, so as long as I have to replace it, I might as well get those Irlens I always wanted. I know the cost. I am ready to get started. What do I do next?"
They did not write back, so I called them.
They said the Irlen system is a dye thet permeates into the lenses I should already have. This means I need to get my new prescription (in my case tri-focal) lenses first, with no coating, and they must have a metal frame 360 degrees around the lens. After which I can go to them and get the Irlen treatment done on my lenses.
I also need to bring from my optometrist the type of material the lenses are made of, a copy of the prescription, and the pupilary distance.
They mailed me a form, which included a self-test questionnaire. You can Google "Long self-test for Irlen Syndrome" to see it.
I got a new eye-test; it cost $188. That was an astronomical price, but it was the most thorough eye-test I have ever had. I took it at The Southwest Eye Clinic in Las Cruces NM.
After the test to determine my prescription, I went home and called the Irlen dealer to double-check the details. They told me the new lenses must be CR39 Plastic, no tint, no coatings, no transition lenses - they should have told me that up-front, for my intent was to get glass transition lenses, which will not work for the Irlen treatement.
I got the new CR39 Plastic lenses. They cost $204.
Once I got my new lenses, I went to Albuquerque and did the Irlen eye-test. It took 2 hours and was a very pleasant experience. It consisted of me keeping my new glasses on while looking through dozens of colored lenses to see which ones helped.
During this it was discovered thet I see Ultra Violet. Only 15% of humans (the Autistics) can see that high of light frequency. This explains why I am so visually overwhelmed, spending all my time wincing at visuals, avoiding making eye-contact, failing to recognize faces, and feeling actual pain in sunlight.
Humans see Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red. Below Red is Infra-Red. Above Violet is Ultra-Violet. I can see the Ultra Violet, which the human brain is not equipped to process, thus explaining why I have to wear transition lenses with brown anti-glare filters over them, and then still become so overwhelmed by the visual input thet I wince and over-stimulate into an Autistic little kid if too many visual things are going on at once.
Autistics are renown for being infuriated by florescent lights. Florescents flicker at 50 beats per second, which the Normals cannot see, but Autistics can, as do I.
This also shows again thet I have super-human Indigo senses (read: Asperger's Syndrome).
I ended up with 4 different lenses layered: 1 filtered out the strobing florescents, 1 made the floor and stairs level, 1 calmed my obsessive attention to over-whelming detail thet used to over-stimulate me into a melt-down, and 1 made me giggle; in that particular case, I could not see the difference, I just felt it emotionally - I felt so giddy.
With these 4 lenses layered, I could walk in a strait line, still noticed crooked picture frames and throw-rugs ever-so-slightly askew (all those Obsessive Personality things thet result in my frantic desperation to have everything visually in perfect arrangement) but did not feel the need to straighten them, and the cement sidewalk was uniformly gray - I used to see every single speck of sand, each 1 a different color, which was overwhelming.
I also wanted to look around, only noticing with these 4 filters layered thet this house had a ceiling fan. When I came in, I only looked at a small spot on the floor in front of me, which appeared wobbly and uneven. With the lenses on, the floor looked level, thus I could walk in a straight line, and I wanted to look around and see other things (as opposed to wincing). I was calm as I looked around the room.
Outside they had a Mesquite tree (the leaves of which look like The Sensitive Plant). Seeing a whole tree full of that small and patterned leaves was interesting to me this time (as opposed to overwhelming as they had always been before), for all the other things outside were relatively non-existent; i.e., I could focus on 1 thing (the leaves) rather than be overwhelmed by everything equally, which usually triggers Attention Deficit thus Anxiety (wincing as my senses all start shutting down before I go into a panic).
The filters I ended up with were Violet, Emerald, Amber, and Navy. Resulting in a Plum color.
They sent my glasses off to The Irlen Institute in California to have them dyed 4 times. Then they will be mailed back to me. It cost $457.
This experience makes me think of Adrian Monk. It also reminds me of Keli from the documentary A Mother's Courage (see my review), wherein he was utterly incapable of walking down stairs; it nearly brings me to tears watching that poor child so overwhelmed by seeing apparently all the Infra-Red and Ultra-Violet - he nearly faints if he looks directly at anything. He so desperately needs Irlen lenses.
They sent my glasses off to The Irlen Institute in California to have them dyed 4 times. Then they will be mailed back to me. It cost $457.
This experience makes me think of Adrian Monk. It also reminds me of Keli from the documentary A Mother's Courage (see my review), wherein he was utterly incapable of walking down stairs; it nearly brings me to tears watching that poor child so overwhelmed by seeing apparently all the Infra-Red and Ultra-Violet - he nearly faints if he looks directly at anything. He so desperately needs Irlen lenses.
I also learned thet Helen Irlen is adamantly opposed to even attempting to teach any member of the evil medical profession how to administer the Irlen eye-test. She believes they are all utterly corrupt, and incapable of refraining from obscene and massive drug over-dosing and ridiculous and damaging eye-surgeries. She flat refuses to teach any medical professional. Her practitioners must have degrees in Education.
I now carry a card thet says:
This client has a perceptual dysfunction which causes hypersensitivity to florescent and bright lights, car head-lights, high contrast, and patterns. This individual is wearing custom colored lenses, not sun-glasses. They are to be worn for all reading/writing-based and other visually intensive activities. Although they may appear dark, they do not reduce clarity nor visibility, even in dim light, and can be worn at night.
This is a card I can show to police if they stop me while driving at night with my apparently very dark glasses on.
My glasses arrived in the mail a week early. I was pleasantly surprised, in fact excited.
The lenses look very dark gray with a plum tone (Elton John and I have our optical needs covered).
Upon putting them on, I sat in front of the computer and read. The letters all look more contrasted with the white page, thus easier to read (they are no longer blurred out by the overwhelming white). Upon looking at a printed paper page, I still notice when there is 1 extra space between words, that white spot notable, but I no longer see rivers of white running down the page, and punctuation marks are clear and seem twice as big to me now. I am still annoyed by fonts thet have serifs, all those sharp edges, but it is not eye-pricklingly-irritating to me, just a mild annoyance.
This was late afternoon, and I next went to work at dusk, so I did not get to analyze how much the sun-light might hurt. But I did instantly notice (as I did at the Irlen test-center) thet the sidewalk was flat and pretty-much a uniform color (I cannot stress enough how astounding it was to me to see a flat surface).
I drove my car in traffic and was amazed by the brightness of the tail-lights and traffic-signals. The red tail-lights, red LED gas-station signs declaring the price of gas, and the red of the stop-lights were all so very vivid, they all jumped out at me and were fascinating and beautiful. It was a vivid ruby color, as opposed to the salmon/coral color it had always been before. Then I saw a green traffic light. It was also amazing to behold - twice as bright but a very dark emerald green, no longer the sea foam/Institution green it had been before. The yellow signal light was also twice as bright and very dark, a deep amber, rather than the pale pastel yellow I had always seen before.
Before these lenses I saw all colors as vague and washed-out. This was due to me wincing in pain at the Ultra-violet, thus making my processor tone down all the colors to a pale shade I could tolerate.
I continued on my drive past a huge motel, where I noticed for the first time thet it had a stripe of blue-green (almost turquoise) neon around the top edge. I have driven past this motel 50 times, but never before noticed that neon.
Also, the turn-signal indicators in the instrument cluster of my car were suddenly visible. All these years I have heard the turn-signal switch clicking, but hardly saw the lights (little green arrows blinking on and off).
I got to work and called the office on my cell-phone to clock myself in. My phone's screen has a picture of a little cell-phone, and a green arrow then moves out of it and across the screen to denote thet the call is being made. For the first time I noticed the arrow was green - I never before thought it was any specific color - I had known it was different from the background, but not necessarily green.
My job for the evening was to be Security Guard at a McDonalds where fights sometimes break out. I walked around just being visible in my uniform, and was (for 4 hours) noticing over and over how amazingly flat the parking lot, sidewalk, and floor was. All my life the ground was wobbly and uneven, possibly explaining why it is so hard for me to walk in a straight line. The curb from sidewalk to parking lot was very square-edged, and about 1/3 higher than I had ever seen before, thus explaining why I was unable to walk up or down stairs without holding the hand-rail (see poor Keli in A Mother's Courage, incapable of navigating a staircase). I always knew my eyes were hyper-sensitive to light, wincing in the pain of sun-light or on-coming headlights at night, but I had no clue my depth-perception was so awful. It is just as amazing to behold a flat floor and the accurate distance in stair-steps as it is to see red, green, and yellow traffic signals accurately for the first time in 50 years.
Walking around the building (doing rounds) I noticed thet all the cars had bright amber front marker lights. I had always thought they were a pastel yellow. Also the red of assorted signs were each a different shade. Before these lenses all reds looked more-or-less the same washed out/sun-bleached vague reddish (almost a salmon/coral color). Inside the McDonalds I noticed how many different shades of purple they use in their advertising - before, I thought it was all blue, for I could not see the red in it. Also, every customer who came in was wearing colors I had never seen before.
Throughout the night I continued to analyze the color of the skin of every Mexican who came in (living in the SW, at least 65% of the population are Mexicans). Their brown skin looks so evenly-toned to me.
I have always been averse to looking at White people because (due to the fact I can see in Ultra-violet) I see the mauve-toned splotches all over them, which make them look sickly. At the Fireworks store, blue-eyed blonde Jolie was very sickly from her intestinal disorders, and (her wearing shorts) I could see the varying sickly colors of her pale skin. Mexicans might be just as sickly, but I cannot see the splotches through their brown skin, thus they look so healthy to me.
Coincidentally (or not) Mexican food (mostly rice and beans) is the perfect Autism diet, thus resulting in good health for anyone who eats it, Autistic or not (overlooking the fact I was watching Americanized obese Mexicans eat garbage at McDonalds).
Continuing my walks around the building, I noticed the ants scurrying about in the sand. This was also a first for me, in thet before these lenses I would notice every single grain of sand, each a different color, all the ants, every speck of dust or small twig, etc.
1 of the symptoms of AS is "Inability to visually determine the relative difference in value between things." I obsessively notice every detail (in Ultra-violet) but am unable to distinguish the relative difference in value, thus they all appear equal, resulting in me being so overwhelmed by the mind-boggling details thet it triggers Attention Deficit so I cannot focus on any of them! I thus end up wincing at anything visual, resulting in me not being able to remember what I see, and feeling a constant anxiety because I can never quite discern what the hell is going on visually. Sometimes it is so overwhelming to me thet my senses all start shutting down, and I become an Autistic little kid about to start spinning and flapping. All my life I would have daily uncontrollable flashes of rage because I just could not take it any longer.
Some White teenage girls were there too, wearing shorts and tank-tops. I noticed thet their skin seemed all the same uniform color. Eating at McDonalds, they undoubtedly had those sickly mauve splotches all over them, but with these glasses on I could not see it.
I continued throughout the evening stepping up onto the sidewalk, then back down onto the parking lot over and over, amazed by how high the sidewalk looked. And the ground was flat (!) and looked 6 inches closer. All my life it looked wobbly and uneven and so far away, while stair-steps looked wobbly and so much closer together, thus explaining why I always stumble on stairs.
I could look at car headlights without pain, they were no longer a glaring white, but a slight yellowish and not at all uncomfortable to behold - though the street-lights were apparently Halogen or some such, thus irritating and uncomfortable if I looked straight at them.
Also a cop-car pulled over some bad driver. The red and blue flashing lights were shades I had never seen before, twice as bright, deeper and darker colors, and were pleasant to gaze upon, rather than wince-inducingly overwhelming (even though pastel) like they used to be.
The mountains thet are the back-drop to Las Cruces are exceptionally jagged; they are called The Organ Mountains because they look vaguely like a pipe-organ (you can Google "Organ Mountains images"). With these lenses I noticed there are twice as many jaggedy peaks as I thought there were. Before these lenses I was so overwhelmed by light thet my mind blocked out about half of what I was seeing. I would look at those mountains and see the peaks very clearly with my 20/20-according-to-the-optometrist eye-sight. But the Ultra-violet light, optometrists do not test for because humans are not supposed to be able to see Ultra-violet, hurt and thus my brain filtered out half of what was supposedly visible to someone with 20/20 vision.
The next day I analyzed the sunlight.
In day-light, I do not like to look at anything white. The sunlight reflecting off of it annoys me. It does not hurt like it used to though. I think it is a matter of me simply adjusting to being without my brown anti-glare filters.
Black people now have a slight reddish tint to their skin; there is so much more depth and texture to their exotic color (I never noticed before).
I have always liked that pearl color of the new Cadillacs. It really played into my non-existent depth-perception; i.e., I felt like I could sink my hand into the car about 6 inches, just because of that color. Today they look pink; it is more of a combination of pink-champagne and pearl, and looks solid.
Yesterday I was Security at the City Utilities building. It is sand colored adobe with a turquoise stripe around the top. I always knew there was that stripe, but I had never seen it as actually turquoise before. It now surprises me, like that Hotel with the neon, I had seen it, but it did not register as being a specific color.
I am coming to understand why I have always thought of White people as simply bleh to look at. With my brain wincing at the Ultra-violet, thus blocking out 50% of the color, or at least toning it down to Pastel, white skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair "pastelled" into nothing. They are just so boring to look at, they are relatively invisible (plus Ultra-violet reflects off of those colors, making me wince). But if they are Mexican with brown skin raven hair and black eyes, I really notice - because those are not really colors, they are vivid contrasts against the bleached-out pastel world I live in (plus they do not reflect Ultra-violet light).
With these glasses on I might now notice thet White people are in fact good looking, because I can only now actually see them with any contrast.
Last night I was Guard at the Pizza place again. The young people who work there, and I have seen a hundred times before, all looked so different. I studied their colors, and could hardly recognize them. It took me 20 seconds to recognize the easily-recognizable elf Chrystal, and it took me all night, and I am still not sure if that was Eileen. Even (the distinctively exotic-looking) Alex looked so different I hardly recognized her. She had been apparently a mix of Asian and European; peaches and cream complexion with a slight yellow tint, and slanty eyes the color of plain brown paper. With my new lenses she looks more like a combination of Native American and European; her color has so much more red to it, now a mixture of sand and red brick color. And her light brown eyes are now a dark red brick color.
It was also the facial features; due to my horrible depth perception I now see the features of her face as so very different. Her face is more flat and broad - now it looks Native American to me as opposed to Asian.
[Here I edited out a whole page of hateful ranting. It is not necessary here on the web-site.]
Remember in the book Sound Of a Miracle (see my review) where Dr Berard told Annabel thet when Georgiana's hearing is corrected she might go into a rage, "So watch out!"? Maybe that sort of opposite-from-what-one-might-expect reaction (as demonstrated in the above hateful ranting) is what is going on because I can see normally now; i.e., instead of feeling grateful thet I can now see, I cannot help but feel enraged thet I went so long nearly blind. Instead of feeling giddy, I feel an angry "Well, it is about time!" type of gnashing-teeth fury.
My dreams have changed a lot in their visual content since I got these lenses, apparently due to my brain learning a new way to interpret visual input, thus play it back to me in dreams.
A week later, I am in a relatively good mood. I still daily notice thet the ground is flat and 6 inches closer, the amazing color of traffic signals, and the texture of clouds.
I still feel uncomfortable with sun-light, but not blinded by it. And I still hate driving at night, the on-coming headlights wince-inducing, but only half as bad as they used to be.
I am also fascinated by the apparent improvement in my hearing. All my life I have had to read lips in order to understand what someone was saying (this is why Autistics look at mouths instead of eyes), or smell everything I saw - syncing 2 senses together before I could trust either of them.
Yesterday I made small-talk with Lori, the receptionist at Utilities. She used to live in the Santa Fe vicinity, where they have snow in the winter, and we discussed the weather of New Mexico for 10 minutes. I could hold her gaze without anxiety, and understand what she said without reading her lips. I also was not irritated by this small-talk. This is apparently due to my mind no longer wincing against the Ultra-violet, thus it has relaxed enough to perceive light, depth, and color accurately - also relaxing enough to allow my CAPD and Attention Deficit to calm down. New glasses improved my hearing; how ironic.
Possibly when I get my hearing adjusted my touch-sensitivity will calm down. Wouldn't that be amazing?
At work at the Magistrate Court, we occasionally have a calm period after 1:45 PM, wherein there is nothing to do but read a book or play on the computer. I usually play Free Cell (a complicated form of the Solitaire) on the computer.
1 of the other guards introduced me to a new video game. I allowed him to waste my time showing me a pointless video game for 15 minutes, even though I was not really interested. I preferred to play Free Cell because it is about (Autistic) pattern-recognition, as opposed to video game strategy. I am profoundly good at recognizing patterns (and easily overwhelmed by them - especially pleated fabric or stairs) but awful at inventing visually oriented strategies, such as how to get out of a building with too many intersections (not the smartest mouse in the maze). If your teeth are crooked, that really bothers me because the pattern is not correct, and strategizing often leaves me as a deer-in-headlights. Plus I like Free Cell because all the cards hold still. Video games move around a lot, which is overwhelming to me. I do not watch movies in theaters because the picture is too big for me to process.
The main point of this is thet I was not irritated by "having to suffer" someone interacting with me in a small-talk sort of way about some pointless video game; it did not really bother me. I actually played the game for another 15 minutes, not really caring to be annoyed with it or him.
I also feel more inspired to "come out" to people about being Autistic. This is partly due to me no longer wincing in anxiety at how overwhelming everything is (especially people), but also due to there now being light at the end of the tunnel. Now thet I am drastically reducing my symptoms, I am not as averse to revealing them.
It used to make me angry when pathetic egoless infant bullies would abuse me for admitting weakness, when I thought I was being educational. Now if some moron is intimidated by that, I can readily express my contempt toward them rather than feel hurt by them or irritated with their stupidity.
Unfortunately you should not "come out" to someone who does not want to hear it. They have to ask, and being typical of all Normals, they are afraid of intimacy, thus they seldom ask. I feel sorry for them.
Today when someone asked (as a form of social graces), though they did not really care what my answer would have been - "How is it going?", expecting me to say the equally superficial, "Fine - Thank you", I told them exactly how I was doing. I said I am doing really well because I just got these $850 glasses thet filter out the Ultra-violet I can see but my brain cannot process. I went on explaining the basics of what I said above.
Later that day another person asked how I was, so I told them I was doing well because of my glasses, and proceeded to tell them about Sensory Processing Disorders.
5 years ago I would have felt anxiety if anyone talked to me at all, and kept my information to myself (unless it was an "intimate" relationship, wherein I would spill my guts and cry to them, in which case they would panic and run away as usual). And only in these last 2 weeks (since I got these lenses) have I acquired the ability, in fact enthusiasm, to "come out" and openly talk to whomever asks, in both a personable and educational way, without it being either inappropriately spill-my-guts-to startled-strangers or an intellectually-intimidating Aspie soap-box lecture.
Today I also recognized just how much my hearing is further evening out - because of the glasses! My brain was so busy wincing at the Ultra-violet thet it also winced out the stability of my hearing, resulting in CAPD.
Now I must try to remember what I thought I saw when I was a kid who could not hear.
I start to realize why I have always been repulsed by porn. It usually features White people under stark studio lights, thus their skin reflects a lot of wince-inducing Ultra-violet. I do not care if they are naked and cumming. I do not want to look at White people!
Now thet I have these glasses, I might learn to examine their color and thus maybe come to appreciate it. But I have 50 years of defensiveness to un-learn (and I still hate porn).
Since getting these glasses, my handwriting has changed. Handwriting represents your personality. My handwriting has definitely changed, though I cannot put my finger on what aspect of my personality is different now thet I am not wincing.
Another change is thet my Chronic Fatigue (I always blamed on allergies) has waned a bit. I used to be a person who needed 11 hours of deep sleep every night, only to wake up utterly exhausted. Then I got the mercury out of my teeth, and got my allergies under control, and I started sleeping 10 hours. I would still jolt awake at the slightest noise several times a night due to my CAPD (my hearing does not turn off when I go to sleep, which is infuriating). But since acquiring these lenses, I now sleep 9 hours or even less, seldom waking up due to noise, and wake up in a relatively good mood (or at least no longer in a despairing exhaustion). My brain was always so exhausted from wincing at light, thet I could never get enough sleep to compensate.
Today I found a dead dragonfly. I examined it closely and studied the amazing colors (green chrome I could not have truly seen before). After I was finished, I put it back on the ground and walked away. Then I realized thet for the first time in my life I had not carefully smelled what I was looking at; I no longer needed to sync 2 different senses in order to decipher what I am perceiving.
My hearing has also improved, in thet while I am typing this I am also listening to my iTunes program. I always have it playing while I write (in my Autistic need for audio pattern recognition to help me maintain focus). Yesterday I was listening to a Soul Coughing song, and for the first time the sampler parts were as loud as everything else in the mix, thus I thought of them as (comparatively) almost the lead instrument in the song - this band uses samples mainly as texture and shading behind the other instruments, not as specific notes.
All my life I have composed music I refered to as as "Communist Composition" wherein every instrument was exactly equal in importance to all the others (thus explaining why I love Rush and Sleater-Kinney). That also made me an excellent Record Producer because I could hear everything as equally important. Now I can auditorily sort things into categories according to importance slightly better than before, or at least enough thet that sampler part of the song jumped out at me, when all the dozen other times I had heard that song I barely noticed the sampler. It had been just texture in the background, now it was at least equal to all the other instruments. Thus the waning of the Asperger symptom mentioned above: "Difficulty determining the relative difference in value between things."
All of my senses still shut down equally when confronted with too much stimuli in any 1 of the senses.
Yesterday I went out into the sun just as a train passed blowing it's horn. The combination of too much light and too much noise together made me lose my location in my body. Physically I could feel practically nothing.
This happened while I was attempting to talk to someone who was sitting in their car. I was not able to recognize they had a dog in the back seat, for that would require even more visual processing. Me being "overly friendly" (from the dog's perspective) actually freaked the dog out. It was a large dog, and it stuck it's head out the window and roared viciously at me, it's teeth bared within a foot of my arm. I was annoyed by this additional sight and sound over-stimulation, in thet it made my body go even further numb and put me practically out of my body entirely.
Any Normal person would have jumped away in a fight-or-flight response. But all of my senses winced and turned down their intensity even more, as I delivered the message in Flat Effect, and then went back inside.
When this sort of thing happens I can hardly hear my own voice.
When Autistics drink milk, they feel like this all the time - Casein-induced spaciness, Attention Deficit, and loss of location in their body.
Concerning my Irlen lenses, the most difficult thing for me right now is sorting colors. I can see colors correctly now, but because I went 50 years seeing them wrong, my brain has to learn how to process them; e.g., playing Free Cell, I am getting good at the actual playing of the game, the pattern-recognition something Autistics excel at, but I constantly try to put a red card on a red card (when they are supposed to alternate red/black/red/black), for, though I see the difference between red and black cards relatively well now, my brain has not yet learned what to do with that information.
It is like being a genius because I have read so many books, but socially retarded because I do not know what to do with the information; or a college graduate with a worthless degree - they cannot get a job with it because they have no actual work-experience. They have knowledge but no wisdom.
Like me intently examining the color of someone's irises, oblivious they think I am staring at them, I can see the blatant difference between a black and a red card, but my mind does not know what to do with that information because I never had it before.
There is this movie called Blink (see my review) wherein a woman who was blinded as a child got surgery restoring her vision around the age of 30. Her eye-sight was thus now normal, but her brain did not know what to do with that information, so she could sometimes look directly at something, but, though her eyes saw it perfectly and sent the information to her brain, she would not mentally "see" it until much later. I am experiencing this to a slight degree.
I have had my Irlens for 5 weeks now. Last night was the first time I had dreams thet included the colors I can now see accurately; i.e., it took 5 weeks of wearing these glasses before my brain acquired the ability to process color accurately, to the extent thet it started using those colors in my dreams.
I have also been more cheerful in general this last week, due mainly to me no longer wincing in pain all day from the Ultra-violet. Also, my hearing continues to even out.
Every night I fall asleep listening to my iTunes program. As I get closer to sleep, my mind, no longer wincing at the light, relaxes, thus allowing my hearing to even out, which results in my hearing increasing in sensitivity drastically. As I get more and more relaxed, I have to get up and turn down the volume over and over. Eventually I get sleepy enough, I turn off the computer and go to sleep.
By that time my eyes have adjusted to pitch-black, thus looking at the computer screen to point and click it off really hurts. I am not able to re-adjust to the light of a computer screen - it just hurts. But if I put these glasses back on, I can then at least turn off the computer without pain.
Then I go to sleep. By the time I am dead-asleep my hearing is on full-blast, thus I wake up constantly to the slightest noise.
Anyway, since wearing these glasses for nearly 6 weeks, my hearing still does this, but probably only half as much as it did before.
After 9 weeks of wearing my Irlens, music continues to sound differently, and I am more aware of my other (very subtle) Sensory Processing Disorders; specifically, my senses becoming more acute under stress.
Utterly unable to multi-task, I burned something on the cooking stove, thus the house smelled mildly of smoke. This olfactory over-stimulation made my ability to process color go bad again - I lost some ability to properly match the cards in a game of Free Cell. It also made my hearing amplify slightly, so I had to turn down the music 1 notch; i.e., my brain wincing at the smell also turned down my color processing while amplifying my hearing. As the smoke scent cleared, my color processing returned to what it was before, as did my hearing. This is called Synesthesia.
Before I got these lenses, I only noticed the drastic jolting changes, not these very subtle ones.
Another thing is my sense of taste, which I never thought had anything wrong with it. For the last year or so I have loved this salsa called Meoqui - it is very dark and very spicy. After 9 weeks with Irlens, I can no longer tolerate Meoqui. It now tastes blow-your-head-off spicy hot!; i.e., my sense of taste is becoming normal now thet my mind is not wincing at the light. All these years, I have not only seen in pastel, I have tasted in pastel!
I now hear words. Before, I had to read lips because I mostly heard the notes.
Irlen Diary - Week 15:
I have finally adjusted to seeing color accurately. I still make occasional mistakes matching the color of cards in a game of Free Cell, but very rarely. And I still love the color of traffic signals, but no longer drool in stunned amazement.
I also continue to hear music differently, hearing details at different volume levels; i.e., the mix of the tracks' sounds continues to change and sound more clear.
At this point I feel I am ready for Audio Integration Training (see my AIT page).
In my case, fixing my Visual Processing Disorder before I addressed my CAPD was a good idea, because my ability to see Ultra-violet was messing up all my other senses to such extent thet if I had fixed my hearing first, then got the Irlens, I would probably have to go get my hearing adjusted again.
So, though I considered CAPD to be my worst symptom, getting the Irlens first revealed to me thet I had horrible Visual Processing and had not known how bad it really was.
After 17 weeks with these lenses, all of my Sensory Processing Disorders have reduced notably. I feel I am functionally alleviated of most of my former symptoms of Autism.
Now my worst symptoms are (first and foremost) my inability to multi-task, especially visually. Also, my continued preference to be alone, my general contempt for humanity, my continued touch-aversion and general physical hyper-sensitivity (I am usually naked at home because I cannot stand clothing touching me). Though my hyper-sensitive state has improved drastically since adding vitamin supplements K2, D3, B6, Glutathione, and Selenium. And my intestinal state is apparently superb since adding mega-Probiotics.
I feel I am in the best physical condition I have ever been in in my life, other than becoming soft from lack of exercise due to my cushy day-job. I did buy some dumbbells to carry in my car so when I am posted at a boring site I can tromp about pumping iron to some extent. Otherwise I think I am healthier than anyone else. I have healthy bowel movements 3 times a day thet have hardly any scent. My sweat has hardly any scent. My breath has hardly any scent. I feel good most of the time, and rarely ever sleep a full 8 hours a night. Now I can sleep 7 hours and wake up feeling good.
I would say thet half of this is due to ingesting the proper Autism Diet and nutritional supplements, and the other half is from these glasses. It amazes me.
It also horrifies me to see these "typical" Autistic kids screaming and flapping while their moron parents (who have apparently never heard of books nor the Internet) shrug helplessly while Dr Frankenstein Mengele pokes another pound of psychiatric drugs down the kid's throat, resulting in a chemical lobotomy, while doing nothing to address the actual causes of Autism.
This is why I publish this. Autism is a joke thet need not exist, if only people would wake up and learn how to read a book.
A mere 5 years ago I discovered what was wrong with me. It only took me those 5 years to become this much of an expert, thus practically (or at least comparatively) curing myself - no thanks to the (utterly corrupt puppet-whores of the pharmaceutical industry) medical profession. And no thanks to the majority of Autism web-sites, which only want to provide a safe place to wallow in it.
Now I just wish I was actually making a difference. The only way I think that can happen is for me to adopt an Autistic child and cure them myself.
Week 18.
I feel relatively cheerful most of the time now; i.e., I am bitter and negative all the time as usual, but it no longer has an exasperation to it. I honestly have no anger energy. In fact the occasions when I throw a tantrum (a couple times a week), I feel exhausted by it rather than energized.
The only thing thet still makes me tantrum is noise. If the neighbors in the apartment above mine are stomping about as if they were bouncing bowling balls, I go into a rage and thrash about violently for 15 minutes, then it is over.
I used to feel like that about everything all the time, due to me perpetually wincing in pain at the Ultra-violet light I did not know I could see.
This week I finally stopped feeling stunned by the color of traffic signals; i.e., my brain has finally adjusted to seeing those colors, so now I actually process them correctly. On-coming headlights are almost tolerable now. I still hate driving at night due to me being so very non-visual. If it is dark besides, I make many illegal turns and run red lights without realizing I am doing it until I am already through the intersection. I need the reference-point of land-marks in day-light for me to be able to keep track of what is going on.
I still play Free Cell every day to train my brain to process the color red. Now in only about 1 out of every 5 games do I accidentally put a red card on a red card; i.e., I still have a problem processing red, but only to a relatively slight degree.
5 months have passed since I acquired these lenses. I now notice how very quickly my eyes adjust to the dark. Especially when I am in the dark, eyes adjusted, then I accidentally reflect the spot-light off a window, glaring myself in the eye. In this scenario, I used to see nothing but neon green for a few minutes until my eyes finally re-adjusted. With my Irlen lenses, and the many months I have worn them necessary for my brain to adjust to seeing through them, my eyes re-adjust to the dark in about 10 seconds after the glare. It is amazing.
I guess this is (relatively) what a Normal person's visual processing is like.
Irlen. Month 7.
I think I have adjusted to these lenses; i.e., I am not improving any more - this is as good as it gets. I will say my Autism symptoms have probably been alleviated by about 1/3 over-all due entirely to these lenses. The only things I still notice once a week or so is thet a song I have heard 20 times before has a tiny detail in it I had not noticed before; i.e., my hearing continues to even out in it's accuracy because my Visual Processor is no longer wincing at the light.
Irlen. Month 11.
It took me these 11 months to fully adjust to all the good they can do for me. I highly recommend them. And like the GF/CF Diet, stay with it! Do not assume thet because the Diet does not cure Autism in a week, that means it does not work. It took me 4 years on that Diet before I got the full effect. It took 11 months with these glasses to get the full effect.
20 months in, I can finally play Free Cell without putting red cards on red cards; i.e., it took nearly 2 years before I could sort colors accurately. Before I got my Irlens, my depth perception was so bad thet I only made 1-dimensional paintings, now I can make them in 3-D.
Irlen. Month 22.
I have now adjusted to the lenses to such extent thet I cannot take them off in sunlight; my processor has relaxed enough thet without the lenses I am outright blinded by sunlight - it is unbearable to even open my eyes.
It allows me to recognize just how much pain I was in before I got the lenses. My daily Autistic melt-down/rage-attacks were cause by me being so overwhelmed by light. Now I never have melt-downs. Now I am calm most of the time (as long as I keep my glasses on).
2 years after I first got my lenses, my mentally ill sister (Paranoid Schizophrenic, Multiple Personality, Autistic) finally got hers. Here is an E-mail from her:
I just got back from 4 hours with the Lens person.
It is interesting how each lens effects me physically. I relaxed and my headache went away. Another lens felt like I was in the quiet of a cardboard box. One made my stomach relax. Finally 11 lenses later my shoulders that feel like they have marbles under the shoulder-blades relaxed.
I ended up with 11 lenses! She said that my color mix falls in line with what most Autistic people need. We looked out the window with all 11 lenses, and Wow! 3 dimensional! I cannot wait to get them.
I have an appointment with the eye doc for a new prescription on Tuesday. They make up the glasses and I send them to my evaluator and she sends them to the company to have the color layers infused into them. In 3 or 4 weeks I will have them.
After 6 months she is giving me a free up-date where we retest the colors, as they may shift due to healing of my highly overworked brain. Also I will probably be able to stop some of my meds. - M.
I have 4 filters, and they have changed my life! Imagine how much it is going to help M, her needing 11 filters.
They came today! So I am typing in the dark, with dark glasses on and can see the letters on the keyboard. They still do not cure the double vision; I expect that would take surgery. But I cannot wait to try them out tomorrow with paperwork, and next day with Tai Chi - I expect the spacial concept will be so much easier. It will take time for my eyes and brain to adjust.
These are BEAUTIFUL glasses! Wow. So Beautiful. - M.
6 months later:
I notice it is quieter, and I can walk better, and things now look 3-D. But my actual vision is not improved, and is in fact getting worse. Though that may improve with the surgery to my spine.
I think they are too dark, but that can be fixed later.
I did put on a pair of my old glasses ... and ripped them off with a scream! Everything surrounded by flashing colors and a Migraine type effect. I cannot believe I was getting around in them for years. Bright bare-naked blaring noise and light! No wonder I was teetering on hysteria all the time.
I have a pair of normal glasses I can read well in, and I use them when I need to make myself understood by people who will not look me in the face with dark glasses on. But if I try to read in a lighted area with them, neon lights specifically, my eyes sting and stream tears like I got lotion in them or something.
So, wow! Irlens are such a relief, and should get even better when I get the re-check. I am going to wait until 6 months after the spine-surgery to give the neurological flow a chance. - M.
You can read an excellent interview with Helen Irlen (the inventor of Irlen Lenses) at
www.autism.com/index.php/understanding_irlens
The Irlen Ambassadors are non-profit groups who raise money to buy Irlen lenses for those who cannot afford them.
Google Irlen Ambassadors and find many of these groups world-wide. I encourage you to join in the efforts to raise money for this worthy cause.
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4 years later my prescription lenses were obsolete, so I had to get new ones. Thus I had to get new Irlen dye for them. So I took my new glasses and me to the Irlen practitioner to get re-tested for new tint. I was surprised how much my need for Irlen colors had changed. These new glasses ended up being a bright golden orange color.
I now carry a card thet says:
This client has a perceptual dysfunction which causes hypersensitivity to florescent and bright lights, car head-lights, high contrast, and patterns. This individual is wearing custom colored lenses, not sun-glasses. They are to be worn for all reading/writing-based and other visually intensive activities. Although they may appear dark, they do not reduce clarity nor visibility, even in dim light, and can be worn at night.
This is a card I can show to police if they stop me while driving at night with my apparently very dark glasses on.
My glasses arrived in the mail a week early. I was pleasantly surprised, in fact excited.
The lenses look very dark gray with a plum tone (Elton John and I have our optical needs covered).
Upon putting them on, I sat in front of the computer and read. The letters all look more contrasted with the white page, thus easier to read (they are no longer blurred out by the overwhelming white). Upon looking at a printed paper page, I still notice when there is 1 extra space between words, that white spot notable, but I no longer see rivers of white running down the page, and punctuation marks are clear and seem twice as big to me now. I am still annoyed by fonts thet have serifs, all those sharp edges, but it is not eye-pricklingly-irritating to me, just a mild annoyance.
This was late afternoon, and I next went to work at dusk, so I did not get to analyze how much the sun-light might hurt. But I did instantly notice (as I did at the Irlen test-center) thet the sidewalk was flat and pretty-much a uniform color (I cannot stress enough how astounding it was to me to see a flat surface).
I drove my car in traffic and was amazed by the brightness of the tail-lights and traffic-signals. The red tail-lights, red LED gas-station signs declaring the price of gas, and the red of the stop-lights were all so very vivid, they all jumped out at me and were fascinating and beautiful. It was a vivid ruby color, as opposed to the salmon/coral color it had always been before. Then I saw a green traffic light. It was also amazing to behold - twice as bright but a very dark emerald green, no longer the sea foam/Institution green it had been before. The yellow signal light was also twice as bright and very dark, a deep amber, rather than the pale pastel yellow I had always seen before.
Before these lenses I saw all colors as vague and washed-out. This was due to me wincing in pain at the Ultra-violet, thus making my processor tone down all the colors to a pale shade I could tolerate.
I continued on my drive past a huge motel, where I noticed for the first time thet it had a stripe of blue-green (almost turquoise) neon around the top edge. I have driven past this motel 50 times, but never before noticed that neon.
Also, the turn-signal indicators in the instrument cluster of my car were suddenly visible. All these years I have heard the turn-signal switch clicking, but hardly saw the lights (little green arrows blinking on and off).
I got to work and called the office on my cell-phone to clock myself in. My phone's screen has a picture of a little cell-phone, and a green arrow then moves out of it and across the screen to denote thet the call is being made. For the first time I noticed the arrow was green - I never before thought it was any specific color - I had known it was different from the background, but not necessarily green.
My job for the evening was to be Security Guard at a McDonalds where fights sometimes break out. I walked around just being visible in my uniform, and was (for 4 hours) noticing over and over how amazingly flat the parking lot, sidewalk, and floor was. All my life the ground was wobbly and uneven, possibly explaining why it is so hard for me to walk in a straight line. The curb from sidewalk to parking lot was very square-edged, and about 1/3 higher than I had ever seen before, thus explaining why I was unable to walk up or down stairs without holding the hand-rail (see poor Keli in A Mother's Courage, incapable of navigating a staircase). I always knew my eyes were hyper-sensitive to light, wincing in the pain of sun-light or on-coming headlights at night, but I had no clue my depth-perception was so awful. It is just as amazing to behold a flat floor and the accurate distance in stair-steps as it is to see red, green, and yellow traffic signals accurately for the first time in 50 years.
Walking around the building (doing rounds) I noticed thet all the cars had bright amber front marker lights. I had always thought they were a pastel yellow. Also the red of assorted signs were each a different shade. Before these lenses all reds looked more-or-less the same washed out/sun-bleached vague reddish (almost a salmon/coral color). Inside the McDonalds I noticed how many different shades of purple they use in their advertising - before, I thought it was all blue, for I could not see the red in it. Also, every customer who came in was wearing colors I had never seen before.
Throughout the night I continued to analyze the color of the skin of every Mexican who came in (living in the SW, at least 65% of the population are Mexicans). Their brown skin looks so evenly-toned to me.
I have always been averse to looking at White people because (due to the fact I can see in Ultra-violet) I see the mauve-toned splotches all over them, which make them look sickly. At the Fireworks store, blue-eyed blonde Jolie was very sickly from her intestinal disorders, and (her wearing shorts) I could see the varying sickly colors of her pale skin. Mexicans might be just as sickly, but I cannot see the splotches through their brown skin, thus they look so healthy to me.
Coincidentally (or not) Mexican food (mostly rice and beans) is the perfect Autism diet, thus resulting in good health for anyone who eats it, Autistic or not (overlooking the fact I was watching Americanized obese Mexicans eat garbage at McDonalds).
Continuing my walks around the building, I noticed the ants scurrying about in the sand. This was also a first for me, in thet before these lenses I would notice every single grain of sand, each a different color, all the ants, every speck of dust or small twig, etc.
1 of the symptoms of AS is "Inability to visually determine the relative difference in value between things." I obsessively notice every detail (in Ultra-violet) but am unable to distinguish the relative difference in value, thus they all appear equal, resulting in me being so overwhelmed by the mind-boggling details thet it triggers Attention Deficit so I cannot focus on any of them! I thus end up wincing at anything visual, resulting in me not being able to remember what I see, and feeling a constant anxiety because I can never quite discern what the hell is going on visually. Sometimes it is so overwhelming to me thet my senses all start shutting down, and I become an Autistic little kid about to start spinning and flapping. All my life I would have daily uncontrollable flashes of rage because I just could not take it any longer.
Some White teenage girls were there too, wearing shorts and tank-tops. I noticed thet their skin seemed all the same uniform color. Eating at McDonalds, they undoubtedly had those sickly mauve splotches all over them, but with these glasses on I could not see it.
I continued throughout the evening stepping up onto the sidewalk, then back down onto the parking lot over and over, amazed by how high the sidewalk looked. And the ground was flat (!) and looked 6 inches closer. All my life it looked wobbly and uneven and so far away, while stair-steps looked wobbly and so much closer together, thus explaining why I always stumble on stairs.
I could look at car headlights without pain, they were no longer a glaring white, but a slight yellowish and not at all uncomfortable to behold - though the street-lights were apparently Halogen or some such, thus irritating and uncomfortable if I looked straight at them.
Also a cop-car pulled over some bad driver. The red and blue flashing lights were shades I had never seen before, twice as bright, deeper and darker colors, and were pleasant to gaze upon, rather than wince-inducingly overwhelming (even though pastel) like they used to be.
The mountains thet are the back-drop to Las Cruces are exceptionally jagged; they are called The Organ Mountains because they look vaguely like a pipe-organ (you can Google "Organ Mountains images"). With these lenses I noticed there are twice as many jaggedy peaks as I thought there were. Before these lenses I was so overwhelmed by light thet my mind blocked out about half of what I was seeing. I would look at those mountains and see the peaks very clearly with my 20/20-according-to-the-optometrist eye-sight. But the Ultra-violet light, optometrists do not test for because humans are not supposed to be able to see Ultra-violet, hurt and thus my brain filtered out half of what was supposedly visible to someone with 20/20 vision.
The next day I analyzed the sunlight.
In day-light, I do not like to look at anything white. The sunlight reflecting off of it annoys me. It does not hurt like it used to though. I think it is a matter of me simply adjusting to being without my brown anti-glare filters.
Black people now have a slight reddish tint to their skin; there is so much more depth and texture to their exotic color (I never noticed before).
I have always liked that pearl color of the new Cadillacs. It really played into my non-existent depth-perception; i.e., I felt like I could sink my hand into the car about 6 inches, just because of that color. Today they look pink; it is more of a combination of pink-champagne and pearl, and looks solid.
Yesterday I was Security at the City Utilities building. It is sand colored adobe with a turquoise stripe around the top. I always knew there was that stripe, but I had never seen it as actually turquoise before. It now surprises me, like that Hotel with the neon, I had seen it, but it did not register as being a specific color.
I am coming to understand why I have always thought of White people as simply bleh to look at. With my brain wincing at the Ultra-violet, thus blocking out 50% of the color, or at least toning it down to Pastel, white skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair "pastelled" into nothing. They are just so boring to look at, they are relatively invisible (plus Ultra-violet reflects off of those colors, making me wince). But if they are Mexican with brown skin raven hair and black eyes, I really notice - because those are not really colors, they are vivid contrasts against the bleached-out pastel world I live in (plus they do not reflect Ultra-violet light).
With these glasses on I might now notice thet White people are in fact good looking, because I can only now actually see them with any contrast.
Last night I was Guard at the Pizza place again. The young people who work there, and I have seen a hundred times before, all looked so different. I studied their colors, and could hardly recognize them. It took me 20 seconds to recognize the easily-recognizable elf Chrystal, and it took me all night, and I am still not sure if that was Eileen. Even (the distinctively exotic-looking) Alex looked so different I hardly recognized her. She had been apparently a mix of Asian and European; peaches and cream complexion with a slight yellow tint, and slanty eyes the color of plain brown paper. With my new lenses she looks more like a combination of Native American and European; her color has so much more red to it, now a mixture of sand and red brick color. And her light brown eyes are now a dark red brick color.
It was also the facial features; due to my horrible depth perception I now see the features of her face as so very different. Her face is more flat and broad - now it looks Native American to me as opposed to Asian.
[Here I edited out a whole page of hateful ranting. It is not necessary here on the web-site.]
Remember in the book Sound Of a Miracle (see my review) where Dr Berard told Annabel thet when Georgiana's hearing is corrected she might go into a rage, "So watch out!"? Maybe that sort of opposite-from-what-one-might-expect reaction (as demonstrated in the above hateful ranting) is what is going on because I can see normally now; i.e., instead of feeling grateful thet I can now see, I cannot help but feel enraged thet I went so long nearly blind. Instead of feeling giddy, I feel an angry "Well, it is about time!" type of gnashing-teeth fury.
My dreams have changed a lot in their visual content since I got these lenses, apparently due to my brain learning a new way to interpret visual input, thus play it back to me in dreams.
A week later, I am in a relatively good mood. I still daily notice thet the ground is flat and 6 inches closer, the amazing color of traffic signals, and the texture of clouds.
I still feel uncomfortable with sun-light, but not blinded by it. And I still hate driving at night, the on-coming headlights wince-inducing, but only half as bad as they used to be.
I am also fascinated by the apparent improvement in my hearing. All my life I have had to read lips in order to understand what someone was saying (this is why Autistics look at mouths instead of eyes), or smell everything I saw - syncing 2 senses together before I could trust either of them.
Yesterday I made small-talk with Lori, the receptionist at Utilities. She used to live in the Santa Fe vicinity, where they have snow in the winter, and we discussed the weather of New Mexico for 10 minutes. I could hold her gaze without anxiety, and understand what she said without reading her lips. I also was not irritated by this small-talk. This is apparently due to my mind no longer wincing against the Ultra-violet, thus it has relaxed enough to perceive light, depth, and color accurately - also relaxing enough to allow my CAPD and Attention Deficit to calm down. New glasses improved my hearing; how ironic.
Possibly when I get my hearing adjusted my touch-sensitivity will calm down. Wouldn't that be amazing?
At work at the Magistrate Court, we occasionally have a calm period after 1:45 PM, wherein there is nothing to do but read a book or play on the computer. I usually play Free Cell (a complicated form of the Solitaire) on the computer.
1 of the other guards introduced me to a new video game. I allowed him to waste my time showing me a pointless video game for 15 minutes, even though I was not really interested. I preferred to play Free Cell because it is about (Autistic) pattern-recognition, as opposed to video game strategy. I am profoundly good at recognizing patterns (and easily overwhelmed by them - especially pleated fabric or stairs) but awful at inventing visually oriented strategies, such as how to get out of a building with too many intersections (not the smartest mouse in the maze). If your teeth are crooked, that really bothers me because the pattern is not correct, and strategizing often leaves me as a deer-in-headlights. Plus I like Free Cell because all the cards hold still. Video games move around a lot, which is overwhelming to me. I do not watch movies in theaters because the picture is too big for me to process.
The main point of this is thet I was not irritated by "having to suffer" someone interacting with me in a small-talk sort of way about some pointless video game; it did not really bother me. I actually played the game for another 15 minutes, not really caring to be annoyed with it or him.
I also feel more inspired to "come out" to people about being Autistic. This is partly due to me no longer wincing in anxiety at how overwhelming everything is (especially people), but also due to there now being light at the end of the tunnel. Now thet I am drastically reducing my symptoms, I am not as averse to revealing them.
It used to make me angry when pathetic egoless infant bullies would abuse me for admitting weakness, when I thought I was being educational. Now if some moron is intimidated by that, I can readily express my contempt toward them rather than feel hurt by them or irritated with their stupidity.
Unfortunately you should not "come out" to someone who does not want to hear it. They have to ask, and being typical of all Normals, they are afraid of intimacy, thus they seldom ask. I feel sorry for them.
Today when someone asked (as a form of social graces), though they did not really care what my answer would have been - "How is it going?", expecting me to say the equally superficial, "Fine - Thank you", I told them exactly how I was doing. I said I am doing really well because I just got these $850 glasses thet filter out the Ultra-violet I can see but my brain cannot process. I went on explaining the basics of what I said above.
Later that day another person asked how I was, so I told them I was doing well because of my glasses, and proceeded to tell them about Sensory Processing Disorders.
5 years ago I would have felt anxiety if anyone talked to me at all, and kept my information to myself (unless it was an "intimate" relationship, wherein I would spill my guts and cry to them, in which case they would panic and run away as usual). And only in these last 2 weeks (since I got these lenses) have I acquired the ability, in fact enthusiasm, to "come out" and openly talk to whomever asks, in both a personable and educational way, without it being either inappropriately spill-my-guts-to startled-strangers or an intellectually-intimidating Aspie soap-box lecture.
Today I also recognized just how much my hearing is further evening out - because of the glasses! My brain was so busy wincing at the Ultra-violet thet it also winced out the stability of my hearing, resulting in CAPD.
Now I must try to remember what I thought I saw when I was a kid who could not hear.
I start to realize why I have always been repulsed by porn. It usually features White people under stark studio lights, thus their skin reflects a lot of wince-inducing Ultra-violet. I do not care if they are naked and cumming. I do not want to look at White people!
Now thet I have these glasses, I might learn to examine their color and thus maybe come to appreciate it. But I have 50 years of defensiveness to un-learn (and I still hate porn).
Since getting these glasses, my handwriting has changed. Handwriting represents your personality. My handwriting has definitely changed, though I cannot put my finger on what aspect of my personality is different now thet I am not wincing.
Another change is thet my Chronic Fatigue (I always blamed on allergies) has waned a bit. I used to be a person who needed 11 hours of deep sleep every night, only to wake up utterly exhausted. Then I got the mercury out of my teeth, and got my allergies under control, and I started sleeping 10 hours. I would still jolt awake at the slightest noise several times a night due to my CAPD (my hearing does not turn off when I go to sleep, which is infuriating). But since acquiring these lenses, I now sleep 9 hours or even less, seldom waking up due to noise, and wake up in a relatively good mood (or at least no longer in a despairing exhaustion). My brain was always so exhausted from wincing at light, thet I could never get enough sleep to compensate.
Today I found a dead dragonfly. I examined it closely and studied the amazing colors (green chrome I could not have truly seen before). After I was finished, I put it back on the ground and walked away. Then I realized thet for the first time in my life I had not carefully smelled what I was looking at; I no longer needed to sync 2 different senses in order to decipher what I am perceiving.
My hearing has also improved, in thet while I am typing this I am also listening to my iTunes program. I always have it playing while I write (in my Autistic need for audio pattern recognition to help me maintain focus). Yesterday I was listening to a Soul Coughing song, and for the first time the sampler parts were as loud as everything else in the mix, thus I thought of them as (comparatively) almost the lead instrument in the song - this band uses samples mainly as texture and shading behind the other instruments, not as specific notes.
All my life I have composed music I refered to as as "Communist Composition" wherein every instrument was exactly equal in importance to all the others (thus explaining why I love Rush and Sleater-Kinney). That also made me an excellent Record Producer because I could hear everything as equally important. Now I can auditorily sort things into categories according to importance slightly better than before, or at least enough thet that sampler part of the song jumped out at me, when all the dozen other times I had heard that song I barely noticed the sampler. It had been just texture in the background, now it was at least equal to all the other instruments. Thus the waning of the Asperger symptom mentioned above: "Difficulty determining the relative difference in value between things."
All of my senses still shut down equally when confronted with too much stimuli in any 1 of the senses.
Yesterday I went out into the sun just as a train passed blowing it's horn. The combination of too much light and too much noise together made me lose my location in my body. Physically I could feel practically nothing.
This happened while I was attempting to talk to someone who was sitting in their car. I was not able to recognize they had a dog in the back seat, for that would require even more visual processing. Me being "overly friendly" (from the dog's perspective) actually freaked the dog out. It was a large dog, and it stuck it's head out the window and roared viciously at me, it's teeth bared within a foot of my arm. I was annoyed by this additional sight and sound over-stimulation, in thet it made my body go even further numb and put me practically out of my body entirely.
Any Normal person would have jumped away in a fight-or-flight response. But all of my senses winced and turned down their intensity even more, as I delivered the message in Flat Effect, and then went back inside.
When this sort of thing happens I can hardly hear my own voice.
When Autistics drink milk, they feel like this all the time - Casein-induced spaciness, Attention Deficit, and loss of location in their body.
Concerning my Irlen lenses, the most difficult thing for me right now is sorting colors. I can see colors correctly now, but because I went 50 years seeing them wrong, my brain has to learn how to process them; e.g., playing Free Cell, I am getting good at the actual playing of the game, the pattern-recognition something Autistics excel at, but I constantly try to put a red card on a red card (when they are supposed to alternate red/black/red/black), for, though I see the difference between red and black cards relatively well now, my brain has not yet learned what to do with that information.
It is like being a genius because I have read so many books, but socially retarded because I do not know what to do with the information; or a college graduate with a worthless degree - they cannot get a job with it because they have no actual work-experience. They have knowledge but no wisdom.
Like me intently examining the color of someone's irises, oblivious they think I am staring at them, I can see the blatant difference between a black and a red card, but my mind does not know what to do with that information because I never had it before.
There is this movie called Blink (see my review) wherein a woman who was blinded as a child got surgery restoring her vision around the age of 30. Her eye-sight was thus now normal, but her brain did not know what to do with that information, so she could sometimes look directly at something, but, though her eyes saw it perfectly and sent the information to her brain, she would not mentally "see" it until much later. I am experiencing this to a slight degree.
I have had my Irlens for 5 weeks now. Last night was the first time I had dreams thet included the colors I can now see accurately; i.e., it took 5 weeks of wearing these glasses before my brain acquired the ability to process color accurately, to the extent thet it started using those colors in my dreams.
I have also been more cheerful in general this last week, due mainly to me no longer wincing in pain all day from the Ultra-violet. Also, my hearing continues to even out.
Every night I fall asleep listening to my iTunes program. As I get closer to sleep, my mind, no longer wincing at the light, relaxes, thus allowing my hearing to even out, which results in my hearing increasing in sensitivity drastically. As I get more and more relaxed, I have to get up and turn down the volume over and over. Eventually I get sleepy enough, I turn off the computer and go to sleep.
By that time my eyes have adjusted to pitch-black, thus looking at the computer screen to point and click it off really hurts. I am not able to re-adjust to the light of a computer screen - it just hurts. But if I put these glasses back on, I can then at least turn off the computer without pain.
Then I go to sleep. By the time I am dead-asleep my hearing is on full-blast, thus I wake up constantly to the slightest noise.
Anyway, since wearing these glasses for nearly 6 weeks, my hearing still does this, but probably only half as much as it did before.
After 9 weeks of wearing my Irlens, music continues to sound differently, and I am more aware of my other (very subtle) Sensory Processing Disorders; specifically, my senses becoming more acute under stress.
Utterly unable to multi-task, I burned something on the cooking stove, thus the house smelled mildly of smoke. This olfactory over-stimulation made my ability to process color go bad again - I lost some ability to properly match the cards in a game of Free Cell. It also made my hearing amplify slightly, so I had to turn down the music 1 notch; i.e., my brain wincing at the smell also turned down my color processing while amplifying my hearing. As the smoke scent cleared, my color processing returned to what it was before, as did my hearing. This is called Synesthesia.
Before I got these lenses, I only noticed the drastic jolting changes, not these very subtle ones.
Another thing is my sense of taste, which I never thought had anything wrong with it. For the last year or so I have loved this salsa called Meoqui - it is very dark and very spicy. After 9 weeks with Irlens, I can no longer tolerate Meoqui. It now tastes blow-your-head-off spicy hot!; i.e., my sense of taste is becoming normal now thet my mind is not wincing at the light. All these years, I have not only seen in pastel, I have tasted in pastel!
I now hear words. Before, I had to read lips because I mostly heard the notes.
Irlen Diary - Week 15:
I have finally adjusted to seeing color accurately. I still make occasional mistakes matching the color of cards in a game of Free Cell, but very rarely. And I still love the color of traffic signals, but no longer drool in stunned amazement.
I also continue to hear music differently, hearing details at different volume levels; i.e., the mix of the tracks' sounds continues to change and sound more clear.
At this point I feel I am ready for Audio Integration Training (see my AIT page).
In my case, fixing my Visual Processing Disorder before I addressed my CAPD was a good idea, because my ability to see Ultra-violet was messing up all my other senses to such extent thet if I had fixed my hearing first, then got the Irlens, I would probably have to go get my hearing adjusted again.
So, though I considered CAPD to be my worst symptom, getting the Irlens first revealed to me thet I had horrible Visual Processing and had not known how bad it really was.
After 17 weeks with these lenses, all of my Sensory Processing Disorders have reduced notably. I feel I am functionally alleviated of most of my former symptoms of Autism.
Now my worst symptoms are (first and foremost) my inability to multi-task, especially visually. Also, my continued preference to be alone, my general contempt for humanity, my continued touch-aversion and general physical hyper-sensitivity (I am usually naked at home because I cannot stand clothing touching me). Though my hyper-sensitive state has improved drastically since adding vitamin supplements K2, D3, B6, Glutathione, and Selenium. And my intestinal state is apparently superb since adding mega-Probiotics.
I feel I am in the best physical condition I have ever been in in my life, other than becoming soft from lack of exercise due to my cushy day-job. I did buy some dumbbells to carry in my car so when I am posted at a boring site I can tromp about pumping iron to some extent. Otherwise I think I am healthier than anyone else. I have healthy bowel movements 3 times a day thet have hardly any scent. My sweat has hardly any scent. My breath has hardly any scent. I feel good most of the time, and rarely ever sleep a full 8 hours a night. Now I can sleep 7 hours and wake up feeling good.
I would say thet half of this is due to ingesting the proper Autism Diet and nutritional supplements, and the other half is from these glasses. It amazes me.
It also horrifies me to see these "typical" Autistic kids screaming and flapping while their moron parents (who have apparently never heard of books nor the Internet) shrug helplessly while Dr Frankenstein Mengele pokes another pound of psychiatric drugs down the kid's throat, resulting in a chemical lobotomy, while doing nothing to address the actual causes of Autism.
This is why I publish this. Autism is a joke thet need not exist, if only people would wake up and learn how to read a book.
A mere 5 years ago I discovered what was wrong with me. It only took me those 5 years to become this much of an expert, thus practically (or at least comparatively) curing myself - no thanks to the (utterly corrupt puppet-whores of the pharmaceutical industry) medical profession. And no thanks to the majority of Autism web-sites, which only want to provide a safe place to wallow in it.
Now I just wish I was actually making a difference. The only way I think that can happen is for me to adopt an Autistic child and cure them myself.
Week 18.
I feel relatively cheerful most of the time now; i.e., I am bitter and negative all the time as usual, but it no longer has an exasperation to it. I honestly have no anger energy. In fact the occasions when I throw a tantrum (a couple times a week), I feel exhausted by it rather than energized.
The only thing thet still makes me tantrum is noise. If the neighbors in the apartment above mine are stomping about as if they were bouncing bowling balls, I go into a rage and thrash about violently for 15 minutes, then it is over.
I used to feel like that about everything all the time, due to me perpetually wincing in pain at the Ultra-violet light I did not know I could see.
This week I finally stopped feeling stunned by the color of traffic signals; i.e., my brain has finally adjusted to seeing those colors, so now I actually process them correctly. On-coming headlights are almost tolerable now. I still hate driving at night due to me being so very non-visual. If it is dark besides, I make many illegal turns and run red lights without realizing I am doing it until I am already through the intersection. I need the reference-point of land-marks in day-light for me to be able to keep track of what is going on.
I still play Free Cell every day to train my brain to process the color red. Now in only about 1 out of every 5 games do I accidentally put a red card on a red card; i.e., I still have a problem processing red, but only to a relatively slight degree.
5 months have passed since I acquired these lenses. I now notice how very quickly my eyes adjust to the dark. Especially when I am in the dark, eyes adjusted, then I accidentally reflect the spot-light off a window, glaring myself in the eye. In this scenario, I used to see nothing but neon green for a few minutes until my eyes finally re-adjusted. With my Irlen lenses, and the many months I have worn them necessary for my brain to adjust to seeing through them, my eyes re-adjust to the dark in about 10 seconds after the glare. It is amazing.
I guess this is (relatively) what a Normal person's visual processing is like.
Irlen. Month 7.
I think I have adjusted to these lenses; i.e., I am not improving any more - this is as good as it gets. I will say my Autism symptoms have probably been alleviated by about 1/3 over-all due entirely to these lenses. The only things I still notice once a week or so is thet a song I have heard 20 times before has a tiny detail in it I had not noticed before; i.e., my hearing continues to even out in it's accuracy because my Visual Processor is no longer wincing at the light.
Irlen. Month 11.
It took me these 11 months to fully adjust to all the good they can do for me. I highly recommend them. And like the GF/CF Diet, stay with it! Do not assume thet because the Diet does not cure Autism in a week, that means it does not work. It took me 4 years on that Diet before I got the full effect. It took 11 months with these glasses to get the full effect.
20 months in, I can finally play Free Cell without putting red cards on red cards; i.e., it took nearly 2 years before I could sort colors accurately. Before I got my Irlens, my depth perception was so bad thet I only made 1-dimensional paintings, now I can make them in 3-D.
Irlen. Month 22.
I have now adjusted to the lenses to such extent thet I cannot take them off in sunlight; my processor has relaxed enough thet without the lenses I am outright blinded by sunlight - it is unbearable to even open my eyes.
It allows me to recognize just how much pain I was in before I got the lenses. My daily Autistic melt-down/rage-attacks were cause by me being so overwhelmed by light. Now I never have melt-downs. Now I am calm most of the time (as long as I keep my glasses on).
2 years after I first got my lenses, my mentally ill sister (Paranoid Schizophrenic, Multiple Personality, Autistic) finally got hers. Here is an E-mail from her:
I just got back from 4 hours with the Lens person.
It is interesting how each lens effects me physically. I relaxed and my headache went away. Another lens felt like I was in the quiet of a cardboard box. One made my stomach relax. Finally 11 lenses later my shoulders that feel like they have marbles under the shoulder-blades relaxed.
I ended up with 11 lenses! She said that my color mix falls in line with what most Autistic people need. We looked out the window with all 11 lenses, and Wow! 3 dimensional! I cannot wait to get them.
I have an appointment with the eye doc for a new prescription on Tuesday. They make up the glasses and I send them to my evaluator and she sends them to the company to have the color layers infused into them. In 3 or 4 weeks I will have them.
After 6 months she is giving me a free up-date where we retest the colors, as they may shift due to healing of my highly overworked brain. Also I will probably be able to stop some of my meds. - M.
I have 4 filters, and they have changed my life! Imagine how much it is going to help M, her needing 11 filters.
They came today! So I am typing in the dark, with dark glasses on and can see the letters on the keyboard. They still do not cure the double vision; I expect that would take surgery. But I cannot wait to try them out tomorrow with paperwork, and next day with Tai Chi - I expect the spacial concept will be so much easier. It will take time for my eyes and brain to adjust.
These are BEAUTIFUL glasses! Wow. So Beautiful. - M.
6 months later:
I notice it is quieter, and I can walk better, and things now look 3-D. But my actual vision is not improved, and is in fact getting worse. Though that may improve with the surgery to my spine.
I think they are too dark, but that can be fixed later.
I did put on a pair of my old glasses ... and ripped them off with a scream! Everything surrounded by flashing colors and a Migraine type effect. I cannot believe I was getting around in them for years. Bright bare-naked blaring noise and light! No wonder I was teetering on hysteria all the time.
I have a pair of normal glasses I can read well in, and I use them when I need to make myself understood by people who will not look me in the face with dark glasses on. But if I try to read in a lighted area with them, neon lights specifically, my eyes sting and stream tears like I got lotion in them or something.
So, wow! Irlens are such a relief, and should get even better when I get the re-check. I am going to wait until 6 months after the spine-surgery to give the neurological flow a chance. - M.
You can read an excellent interview with Helen Irlen (the inventor of Irlen Lenses) at
www.autism.com/index.php/understanding_irlens
The Irlen Ambassadors are non-profit groups who raise money to buy Irlen lenses for those who cannot afford them.
Google Irlen Ambassadors and find many of these groups world-wide. I encourage you to join in the efforts to raise money for this worthy cause.
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4 years later my prescription lenses were obsolete, so I had to get new ones. Thus I had to get new Irlen dye for them. So I took my new glasses and me to the Irlen practitioner to get re-tested for new tint. I was surprised how much my need for Irlen colors had changed. These new glasses ended up being a bright golden orange color.
Once again, they changed my life.
I vigorously recommend Irelen lenses. And I recommend you get them up-dated at least every 2 years, for your processor will change so much from having them.
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3 years later I got another up-date.
They are kind of a mixture of the 2 previous colors. Golden Orange, but with a slight Plum tone.
Again it changed my perception of color. I can again see Red so much better. Just wow. Red is so vivid.
But now I cannot see Blue. Now plain old Blue looks like Army Green. And I cannot see Yellow. Yellow just looks White.
Of course, everything is actually Orange, but my brain sees it as Green and White, rather than Blue and Yellow.
But it also calmed me down more. I am even less sensorily overstimulated than before. I just feel calm.
Instead of getting angry quick, now I get depressed quick. And though this is not good in it's self, it is a drastic improvement over Autistic Melt-downs.
I no longer Fluttershy-out. I no longer need to take black-out breaks. I no longer roar as a Stim. Now I just feel depressed-I-mean-calm.
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They are kind of a mixture of the 2 previous colors. Golden Orange, but with a slight Plum tone.
Again it changed my perception of color. I can again see Red so much better. Just wow. Red is so vivid.
But now I cannot see Blue. Now plain old Blue looks like Army Green. And I cannot see Yellow. Yellow just looks White.
Of course, everything is actually Orange, but my brain sees it as Green and White, rather than Blue and Yellow.
But it also calmed me down more. I am even less sensorily overstimulated than before. I just feel calm.
Instead of getting angry quick, now I get depressed quick. And though this is not good in it's self, it is a drastic improvement over Autistic Melt-downs.
I no longer Fluttershy-out. I no longer need to take black-out breaks. I no longer roar as a Stim. Now I just feel depressed-I-mean-calm.
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2 years later:
Another major up-date, this time much more plum.
The previous pair were great to start with, but over time I adjusted to them so I could no longer see yellow nor white. Both just looked orange.
With this new pair I can see yellow and orange, and all colors more accurately.
And white, the worst offender, is blocked out a lot. Now when I look at clouds or chem-trails I can hardly see them unless thet are a very dense white; i.e., light fog or mist or the whole sky covered in a light chem-traling all just looks like blue sky to me.
I also need much fewer black-out breaks, though I still take them occasionally, especially when I am in the sun for long periods of time.
No drastic life-changing improvements this time. But I feel I am overcomming the visual processing difficulties in general thet caused the Autism symptoms (as long as I have my glasses on). Of course I suffer a white-out if I take them off in sunlight.
Now I just feel frustrated I cannot see in general; i.e., I still processs visuals poorly, but no longer feel the over-stimulation as badly.
These are also much darker over all than any of my previous pairs, but do not seem dark to me when I look through them.
I have been spending a lot of time watching animation recently, studying the details as I watch it play at 1/4 speed - learning how to see. There was a time before Irlen thet I could not stand to even try doing that. Now I enjoy it.
On Feb 1st 2023 I published a new 28-page article in which I vigorousely praise Irlen Lenses.
See my Autism Lectures page. Lecture #24. Learning How To See.
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Another major up-date, this time much more plum.
The previous pair were great to start with, but over time I adjusted to them so I could no longer see yellow nor white. Both just looked orange.
With this new pair I can see yellow and orange, and all colors more accurately.
And white, the worst offender, is blocked out a lot. Now when I look at clouds or chem-trails I can hardly see them unless thet are a very dense white; i.e., light fog or mist or the whole sky covered in a light chem-traling all just looks like blue sky to me.
I also need much fewer black-out breaks, though I still take them occasionally, especially when I am in the sun for long periods of time.
No drastic life-changing improvements this time. But I feel I am overcomming the visual processing difficulties in general thet caused the Autism symptoms (as long as I have my glasses on). Of course I suffer a white-out if I take them off in sunlight.
Now I just feel frustrated I cannot see in general; i.e., I still processs visuals poorly, but no longer feel the over-stimulation as badly.
These are also much darker over all than any of my previous pairs, but do not seem dark to me when I look through them.
I have been spending a lot of time watching animation recently, studying the details as I watch it play at 1/4 speed - learning how to see. There was a time before Irlen thet I could not stand to even try doing that. Now I enjoy it.
On Feb 1st 2023 I published a new 28-page article in which I vigorousely praise Irlen Lenses.
See my Autism Lectures page. Lecture #24. Learning How To See.
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