Wow. This post really spoke to me. I love little thinking activities like the one you described, and I must say, you put it into words in a way I'm not sure I could with the things I think about. I often have difficulty communicating complex ideas to others because so much of the thinking I do is wordless. And I love, absolutely love, how you were able to put that into words. Because unfortunately, we aren't a telepathic species, and so we're limited to communicating through symbols that only scratch at the deeper meaning of things. Thank you so much for writing this, not only because it was a fascinating glimpse into someone else's head, but because it will help me communicate my ideas to others.
My autistic-y thoughts of this kind are highly mythological and quasi-religious, and seem to be a metaphorical way of expressing incredibly complex relationships or emotions I have experienced.
Autistic people do often seem to think and daydream in a more visually complex way than neurotypical people do--- I once had a long argument about daydreams with my high school psychology professor. He insisted you only daydreamed about success or mundane things you'd actually seen. This was so far from what I actually did (Created immensely complex, movie-like scenes in full color in my head, depicting things that never had happened or even could happen) that it was as if him and his lesson lived in a bizarre foreign country I'd never been to and couldn't conceive of. At the time, my fantasy life was all there was of my life that mattered.
Really? Your psychology professor didn't have much of a clue, did he? People, neurotypical and autistic, daydream about all kinds of things. He's not completely off target; his list--success, things you'd actually seen, presumably things that might happen--make up most of most people's daydreams when you measure them by having people set watch alarms and write down what they're thinking about. But that's not all that people think about. We tell stories to each other and to ourselves, not just about things that might happen in real life but about totally mythical worlds. If people never daydreamed about things that had little connection to their everyday lives, where do we get storytellers, authors, poets, artists? And why is it that pretty much every child can "play pretend" in ways that don't have much to do with everyday life--pretending they're spacemen or princesses or dinosaurs, for example
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Autistic people do often seem to think and daydream in a more visually complex way than neurotypical people do--- I once had a long argument about daydreams with my high school psychology professor. He insisted you only daydreamed about success or mundane things you'd actually seen. This was so far from what I actually did (Created immensely complex, movie-like scenes in full color in my head, depicting things that never had happened or even could happen) that it was as if him and his lesson lived in a bizarre foreign country I'd never been to and couldn't conceive of. At the time, my fantasy life was all there was of my life that mattered.
So, yeah.
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