Childhood Imagination + Lack of?

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I don‘t remember much of anything, only a few vague, short scenes.

I recall being fascinated with stones and everything connected to them. On the beach in Sochi, I seemed to do nothing but search for interesting-looking pebbles. Then I‘d find a large flat stone, and another one that was hard and convenient to hold, and would use them to crack the pebbles I had found. I liked to see how they looked when they had just been broken – the fresh surface was often stunningly bright, and very different from the exterior of the stone that had been polished by the sea. I remember one stone I found especially vividly; I think it was some sort of quartz, judging from its texture and colors. When I cracked it, it turned out to be a rich, dark purplish violet which gradually became a snowy white toward the edges. I thought it was really beautiful and was absolutely fascinated with it, and must have kept the several pieces for a long time before they got lost. At home, I had a textbook on minerals which was meant for geology students or something, and I used to study it greedily, as well as reading any articles on geology and minerals in popular science books that I could get my hands on. I wanted to have a proper collection of minerals and was upset that I didn‘t have the right tools for creating one – such as a special hammer for breaking the stones and seeing what they are like inside, small bags for the specimens, a box with tags I could put them into, etc., - but I figured I‘d try and do with whatever tools that were availiable. I also liked grinding different stones into fine powder using the same method, pouring the different powders into separate small containers, and pretending I was making various potions with them.

I also loved collecting pieces of bottle glass that had been polished by the sea until they were smooth and opaque. I especially liked those that were a gentle ultramarine color, and would search for them everywhere (bottles like this weren‘t made very often, and this type of glass was a rare find). But I think I was glad to discover anything that was different from the usual white/transparent or dark bottle-green glass – turquoise pieces, sky-blue pieces, grass-green pieces etc. I had a whole basket filled to the brim with these little polished shards of glass and stones I liked; it was quite big and heavy, for me at least, but I dragged it around with me wherever possible. I tried to persuade my parents to allow me to take it with me on the plane to Vilnius, because it was so hard to leave it behind, and was upset when they refused on grounds that it was nothing more than “extra weight“. I also vaguely remember lining up stones and pieces of glass on the table.

I recall imagining my desk was a temple, and tying several threads - a deep crimson, scarlet, gray, black and white one - in bands round a gray rectangular eraser to make a sort of sacred object. The colors seemed to have some symbolic meaning at the time, and I selected them very carefully. (This was after reading the Old Testament with my mother, the parts about the Jewish Temple I think).

I recall inventing clothes for my dolls by wrapping them in pieces of cloth. My mother had many such pieces left over from her sewing, and she‘d let me play with them. I used to invent diverse clothing styles that way and change them all the time; I especially liked the large pieces of sparkly gray, brown and dark-green velvet we had, which could be used for a long skirt, cape or burqa-like garment. My dolls also had ordinary clothing (my mother even made a few original dresses for them), but they seemed uninteresting, and dressing my doll in them soon bored me. There seemed to be nothing I could really with them.

I‘m not sure if I really collected wires, old coins, radio parts and other random metal objects, but I did have a thing for them. I watched, fascinated, when my uncle or cousin (an electric technician) repaired a radio on the kitchen table. I loved everything about it – the way the melding apparatus operated, the lead turning from a dull lump into bright balls of liquid when the hot tip touched it, the various lamps, electric circuitry and chips inside the machine, even the smell of acid and molten lead. I persuaded somebody to give me some used-up lamps and other radio parts, and carried them about and played with them for a long time. Once someone dropped a great deal of round, coin-like metal pellets of all imaginable sizes onto the road by our house (the largest ones looked like big coins or phone tokens, while the smallest ones were hardly larger than a pinhead, something like a couple millimeters in diameter). There was a factory close nearby, most people in our house worked there, so these could‘ve been by-products from making a type of machine part. I spent a very long time looking for them everywhere; I‘d brush through the grass, dig the sand near our house to see if there were any, peel them out of the tar on the road surface, so that there‘d be black under my fingernails. I searched through every inch of the neighborhood about as vigorously as if I were hunting for hidden gold (and I was just as happy when I happened to come across a few more of these pellets). Other children also collected a fair amount, and I did my best to exchange the pellets for something else, or, if that failed, I simply pleaded with the other children to give me some. I had this urge to collect as many as I could, and my ultimate goal was to get all of them. I remember my mother asked me once to give her some of the bigger ones to use as phone tokens, and I snapped and told her I had to have *all* of them, so I couldn‘t do it; she was very angry and displeased with me because she thought I was being greedy.

Another scene I remember fairly distinctly happened at an airport. I was carrying a red plastic children‘s basket, made in the shape of a Russian-style basket with a lid. It had some thick aluminium wire in it (which I liked very much for some reason), and some other odd metal tidbits and puzzle pieces. When my parents had gone through the luggage check, I was asked to do so too and to show my basket, probably more for the sake of formality than anything else. I declared in a rather flat, categorical manner that I wouldn‘t give it or show its contents to anybody. The staff member at the luggage check had to coax me into showing it, and it seems like she and my parents had a good laugh about the whole incident.

When I was very small (I think I was about four and had only just started talking), my grandma in Sochi took me to a toy store across the road from our apartment block. There, I noticed a game whose purpose I don‘t know up to this day – it looked like a small wooden stool (later I used it for sitting down), only with many legs instead of just four. There were rosy and white plastic balls with holes inside that had to placed into these legs in some sort of sequence. The moment I saw them, I felt I *had* to have them and, as my grandma tells me, I started a real scene. I wouldn‘t calm down when we came home, and the next day my grandma had to go and buy me this game. I never used it whatever way it was intended; it was the plastic balls themselves that atracted me. I don‘t know what was so special about them. I played around with them, lined them up, and I think I enjoyed the very way they looked.

I was in love anything that was shiny, like jewellery. It attracted me not so much because it could be worn, - I think I had little interest in doing so, if any at all, - but because I could play with it and gaze at the light reflecting in the gemstones. My grandma in Sochi had several drawers filled with jewellery, and sometimes she‘d allow me to take it out, examine it or play with it while she was looking. One drawer had jewellery made of beads, as well as combs, cosmetics, hairpins and other such things; this was the one she allowed me to open fairly often. There was also another one, by her bedside table, which had some watches and more serious-looking and costly jewellery made of quality false gemstones, Czech glass and the like. Grandma almost always forbade me to see what was inside, but sometimes I‘d take a look in secret, and it was always like an adventure. Eventually, Grandma gave me a ring with false rubies (I think they were made of Czech glass) from one of the jewellery sets she kept in that drawer; it had one large false ruby in the middle, surrounded by a circle of little fake rubies. I absolutely loved this ring and kept it with me for years. Later, when I happened to play with my cousin, he started pretending that this was a laser-beam ring which, for some reason, he called „schwortz“, and since then I thought of it the same way.

Grandpa used to call me, jokingly, „magpie-thief“ (which is a Russian jocular nickname for a child who loves all shiny things) and said I‘d always had an almost manic passion for all things sparkling and colorful. Later, when I was already a teen, he used to say that I‘d preserved my liking for wearing things like Murano glass from my childhood.

I recall folding shiny green aluminium foil into neat hard rectangles and putting them in an empty yellow plastic pencil-case I had. It was like a tube-shaped box, and very convenient for my purpose. I must have imagined I was making a type of food that way, or that the pieces of foil were magic objects. I carried this pencil-case with me everywhere, and would look inside and take out the pieces of foil right in the street, much to the discontent of my mother. (On the whole, I loved the sight of colored aluminium foil, and the soft metallic sound it made; it was a rare thing in those days, too, so I was really happy when my mother would buy me some. I liked green foil especially – its deep emerald color looked enchanting to me).

I also recall watching some program on TV about how some African food was made (I think it was called „muryo“ and was made with seaweed, pickled cabbage or something else that was cut up into long shreds), and then tearing up colored foil into similar long, thin shreds and filling up bowls with it, imagining that I was making a similar type of food. For some reason, I mostly preferred to use dark blue and violet foil for this, mixing it up with foil of other colors in a certain proportion. I apparently spent many days doing this and used up a lot of foil, and, again, my mother didn‘t like this at all.

I had a lot of beads of very different shapes and colors, most of which I got from my grandma in Sochi. She had a drawerful of massive jewellery, made with many strings of beads wrapped together; many threads in it were old and rotten, and would break easily. When they did, grandma would give the spare beads left from the ruined jewellery to me. I knew this and would sometimes sneak into her drawer when she wasn‘t looking, and would cut or tear the threads on purpose. My mother, who sewed things on her own at that time, and my grandma from Vilnius also gave me some beads. I would play with them by sorting them, putting the different kinds of them in separate glass containers (I especially liked small rounded jars that looked like those one would see in a drugstore, because I could pretend I was a chemist, and, besides, they simply looked nice), and pouring them from one container into another. I must‘ve imagined I was making medicine or some magic potion. This could keep me occupied for hours. Of course, I also tried to embroider things with these beads, or to make simple jewellery like rings or bracelets, but I don‘t seem to have done this too often. It was the look of the beads that I liked most. Among my favorites were rounded beads of a deep brownish-orange color, like that of tea or certain types of amber, with a coppery shine inside; rectangular transparent, sparkly beads of several colors – dark wine-red, bright lemon yellow, colorless and sky-blue; and non-transparent rounded beads that were a brighter and darker mineral green, very similar to the colors seen in jade. Frankly, I still have some of these beads and I still like them as much as I did back then.

I would spend long evenings in Sochi sitting at a low table and playing with some of my favorite objects. I had a Turkish-style enameled bowl with a long stem-like holder, which was probably meant for keeping sweets; it was a dirtyish, dark wine-red, with engraved ornaments filled with sky blue, yellow and green enamel. In it, I kept a few large and very old ivory beads, some transparent colorful puzzle pieces, and bits of jewellery my grandma had given me as a gift. There were also several flattened little building blocks in the shapes of squares, stars, rhomboids etc. They were painted with deep, rich colors I liked – wine-red, rich violet, dark rich emerald green, indigo, - and I seem to have liked their very scent, since they were made of real wood. When the time came to play, I would take my things out of the bowl, line them up on the table or arrange them in a specific order. The lamp by my side had a tasselled covering made of orange canvas, and its diffuse, soft light falling onto the table and my things felt like magic. I remember being enchanted with it, with the way my things shone and their rich colors appeared to glow in the dim lighting. I‘m also pretty sure I imagined a whole fairytale going on while I was playing.

I can‘t remember any of my daydreams up to the age of 11 or 12, so I can‘t tell what I was really thinking about while I was playing with all these things. But I‘m quite sure I imagined a lot off stuff happening. I wonder whether the „lack of imagination“ or „lack of creative play“ criterion could have found its way into DSM simply because all the imagination in ASD children could stay bottled up inside, so to speak – when a child spends hours lining up or sorting building blocks and beads on the table, it may seem pretty uncreative, but in reality (s)he could be imagining a whole world of their own while doing it, and there‘d simply be no way to tell from the outside.

From my later daydreams, it seems like my imagination does have its limitations (I tend to get hooked up on the same things, have trouble coming up with coherent sequences of events, tend to base my characters on those I‘ve come across in real life or in fiction, etc.), but I‘d never say I lack it, and I‘m certain I had more than enough of it as a child as well.

I get real annoyed when people say that people with ASDs have NO imagination. Okay, so some of us (writes while pointing at self) may have LESS imagination than others but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. As a kid, I lined things up, span things AND created amazing imaginary worlds. I am now an artist and last time I checked, you need an imagination to do that. (unless you are copying...)

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

Where in the criteria does it say we lack imagination?

Someone point it out to me.


My old BF ought to see this thread. He will see aspies do indeed have an imagination. He claims he had it when he was little but as he got older, it got harder for him so now he has none.

I played with dolls when I was little and I played house, played school, I even did pretend play like cooking and ironing my clothes. I played with lincoln logs and blocks and Bio train set. I played with my brother's cars and Mighty Max toys. I played with my Polly Pockets and played with my Barbie dolls. I also did dress up and pretended I was having tea with my Barbie tea set. I wrote stories about my cat when I was 10 and then about my 101 Dalmatian obsessions when I was 12.

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When I draw things, I never copy, nor do I draw what I see in my head. Instead I notice minute details on a paper that look like they're part of a bigger picture. How much imagination does that take?