Daydreaming. Do you do it?

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What do you daydream about, if at all? I read that autistic people daydream in a markedly different manner. How do you daydream? Are you ever on a stage? Do you create random characters? Do you daydream about special interests?

Very interested to see the responses!

H

Yeah. Just simple things, really. A normal life, normal things. Sorta a distraction from, and during the dreary moments of my life, to escape things. Characters are from reality, as are the worldly things. I guess interests are there as they are part of my reality.

Quite "boring" here.

What is the "right" way to daydream then?

When I daydream I'm usually thinking about something, something on my to-do list that I'm planning on how to get done in my head, stuff like that. Or I'm just remembering recent stuff that happened. I don't know really.

Great question. I think we would all daydream based on whatever gives us pleasure.

I've always daydreamed. Especially in grade school, since it was so boring and there were usually large windows to look out of.

When I was young, I daydreamed. This occurred generally in school when there was nothing else to do. When I was bored. But as an adult, I rarely ever do this because there are too many things going on.

This may be an interesting question. In a sense humans have two sides to their physical brain. A right side and a left side. Look at a picture of the human skull. The left side is dominant. We are a lot more complex than what most people really believe. These individual brains operate together as a unit. In my case, my primary brain works during the day, but my secondary brain comes out during the deepest state of sleep called REM sleep. Then it comes out to play. As a child my two brains are still developing, trying to join together into a unified whole. Therefore when I was young and bored, it was easy to turn my dominant brain in a type of sleep mode and let my non-dominant brain run wild, to go where ever it wanted to go in dreamland.

No, I don't daydream. I get wrapped up in my thoughts, but they're nearly all logical and firmly rooted in "reality," with the occasional excursion into art. I wish I could think more artistically and poetically, and I've written a few nice artistic songs in my time, but my brain seems much more geared up to hard-headed reason and the practical world. Even as a child I didn't daydream very much, as far as I remember.

Mind you, my night dreams can be quite wacky and imaginative, and I can get quite fascinated with those, I'm glad to say. Being exclusively worldly feels like a wrong turn, I suspect there's more fun to be had in fantasy, though the products of a highly-practical mind can be quite good fun too.

I had such a hard time figuring out what daydreaming meant as a child and young adult.

I finally decided that it meant when I was thinking about things other than what I was supposed to be thinking about. I had no idea that people could actually see pictures in their minds.

I have aphantasia, so never really did "day dream" if that is making up pictures in your mind or visualizing thoughts. I learned at age 69 that I have aphantasia. I did not know when people said "picture this" they really could see images the made up in their minds. I just thought it was another way of saying "imagine this".
So many things make better sense to me now. Learning about my autism has helped me grow in self understanding and learning about my aphantasia has helped too. No wonder I have been so confused for years!

I'd often daydream at school and then find myself being yelled at by the teacher unexpectedly. I remember when I was about 7 I was in class and had to copy a long piece of text into my book. But after I wrote the first few sentences down I suddenly stared into space, with my chin resting on one hand and my pencil in the other, just completely lost in my thoughts for what seemed like an eternity. Then all of a sudden the teacher leaned over my shoulder and growled in my ear to get on with my work otherwise she'd send me to the nursery class, in a threatening voice. Then I got all emotional and burst into tears, and got on with my writing.

Why I didn't get assessed for ADHD back then I don't know, as this was a common occurrence in class. When I was 8-9 the teacher would make us sit on the floor around her desk for hours while she droned on and on about boring stuff, and my mind would start wandering off to Daydream Land. This teacher would then click her fingers in my face and say "are you listening?"

High school was easier to pay attention in class because we only had one hour for each class. I think changing classrooms 4-5 times a day was probably a lot better for a student with ADHD.