Sleep disorders seem to be common for autistics. Insomnia, funky sleep-wake cycles, completely unpredictable sleep cycles, extreme night-owlishness... you name it, we've got it
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I've had sleep paralysis occasionally. The first few times, it was frightening, because it came with frightening dream-images (I don't want to call them hallucinations; this happens when one IS, in some sense, still partly asleep), but I'd read about it before it happened, so I quickly became more matter-of-fact about it.
I'm terrible at lucid dreaming, though. I've tried it, but as soon as my brain realizes it's asleep, it seems to find this alarming and jerks awake. I used to have a lot of semi-lucid states, where I would make certain decisions thinking "This is just a dream, so [strange or dangerous behavior] is okay," but I would somehow not make the inference from "This is just a dream" to "I can become fully lucid and control the dream environment if I want to." The latter just somehow doesn't occur to me, and in the past few years I haven't even been semi-lucid much.
My brain can manufacture quite a lot of detail, including things that you're not "supposed" to be able to do while you're dreaming, like reading text and experiencing taste, touch, sound, and (a dulled version of) pain.
This, yes - I can get those things even in a non-lucid dream. (Reading text and feeling pain vary depending on the dream - sometimes they are notably absent, sometimes they seem to work perfectly. I also have a lot of dreams that shift or blend between different levels of reality, so there are patches of the dream which I am reading in a book or watching on television, patches which I am actually experiencing, and patches which are oddly mixed between these options. :P )
I'm terrible at lucid dreaming, though. I've tried it, but as soon as my brain realizes it's asleep, it seems to find this alarming and jerks awake. I used to have a lot of semi-lucid states, where I would make certain decisions thinking "This is just a dream, so [strange or dangerous behavior] is okay," but I would somehow not make the inference from "This is just a dream" to "I can become fully lucid and control the dream environment if I want to." The latter just somehow doesn't occur to me, and in the past few years I haven't even been semi-lucid much.
My brain can manufacture quite a lot of detail, including things that you're not "supposed" to be able to do while you're dreaming, like reading text and experiencing taste, touch, sound, and (a dulled version of) pain.
This, yes - I can get those things even in a non-lucid dream. (Reading text and feeling pain vary depending on the dream - sometimes they are notably absent, sometimes they seem to work perfectly. I also have a lot of dreams that shift or blend between different levels of reality, so there are patches of the dream which I am reading in a book or watching on television, patches which I am actually experiencing, and patches which are oddly mixed between these options. :P )
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