Poor Imagination

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Now that's genius..

I didn't play with my toys - imaginative play. As a child I rarely expressed interest in stories.

I liked lining things up and also creating geometric patterns with my toys. All my child "artwork" was very rigid and symmetrical. I don't know what originality means. I have learned to love modern art. But even there, I can't imagine a "new" art. I'm just limited in that respect.

Can it be that only NTs can be on the avant-garde of art?

yes,have never had an imagination and am unable to picture anything that hasnt happened, am unable to understand fiction/fake things because they are not real.
it has such an impact that it causes huge difficulties for other people in how they communicate with self though personaly do not see it as an impairment.

I wonder if imagination and visual memory has something to do with being on different parts of the spectrum. From books that I have read people with Autism or Aspergers seem to be on one extreme or another for imagination / visual memory.

I personally always lived deep inside my head and have an extremely vivid imagination. As a child I couldn't even control my imagination. I would visual or think of something and try to keep the image still but it would keep adding and removing things that were not there or that I didn't want to focus on. I was also terrified that people could hear or see what was going on in my mind. I spent countless hours trying to control my mind and break it to my will as I was growing up. Now I can fully control my thought process and at the same time I welcome and understand the way everything is linked inside my head now. Over the years I've also slowly learned how to capture these vivid images or ideas in my head and apply them to an art form. Feels good, feels real good.

I haven't been able to shut off my imagination ever, and I like it that way. It's to the point where I even imagine scenarios in real life that sound funny like out of movies that won't happen.

^I do that too.

I always thought I had a poor imagination. I like to be creative but I can't come up with ideas of my own. I need to look at other people's artwork and then i get ideas of what to do.

I could never write fiction but I can write creatively if I bounce ideas off of what someone else writes. I always need something to trigger my imagination.

I can't read a novel unless the author writes in a colorful descriptive way that paints a picture in my head. I always read the first couple of pages of a book to determine if I want to read it, and it's not what the novel is about, but the writing style of the writer that draws me into reading it.

Another thing I noticed about my imagination is that it rarely includes interacting with people. My artwork includes nature and animals, but no people.
During the holiday season I never go to or get invited to parties, but I see glossy pictures in magazines of food and houses decorated for parties. I look at those pictures and think it would be fun to have a party. I think about the decorations and the food and the music, but not the people. I don't imagine people at my party.

Just because you have to look at something to get ideas doesn't mean you have poor imagination. Ideas always have to be based off of something you have experienced; no idea is truly original, as it is impossible for the brain to come up with something never experienced.

I have to get inspired too, but what I imagine can get pretty far removed from my experiences, probably because I'm an associative thinker. I one time caught myself being inattentive in class, and noticed that what I was thinking about was based off of what was being discussed before I became inattentive, but was getting farther removed from the subject as time went on.

Also, my English teacher pointed out I had a circumstantial writing style, which might have something to do with the associative thinking.

It took me at least 8 years to understand what neurotypical people intended toys for. I mostly stimmed and played with the car wheels and lined up all of the cars and Lego figures.

This.^

When someone bought me a barbie, even if I had asked for it, I had no idea what to do with it...so I would take it's clothing off, cut all of it's hair off, chew on it for a while (the legs and arms, when I was a kid I chewed on everything.) and then when I couldn't think of anything else to do with it I would chase my sister around and whack her with it. (It didn't cross my mind that this might hurt because I had a very high pain tolerence. I feel kind of bad about it now.)

My imagination is not good. It's not spontaneous at all. All of my actual play as a kid was just reenactments of the shows I was obsessed with (digimon and sailor moon).

I can't really daydream either. If I try to visualize something in my mind it's all foggy, dark and fragmented. I can't hold the "image" for very long, especially if it's complicated or I need to see details, it give me a headache.

I can relate to this. Technically mine weren't Barbie's, they were these cheap lookalikes. I did try to play with them, but I didn't quite get the hang of it. I clothed them, and then had them "walking" on the top of a Lego house or a tiny stool, not sure. I didn't find much joy in it. I hit my brother too, but that was unrelated to the Barbies. We have a tape from when we were in the bathtub, and I were hitting him with a plastic boat, I did it over and over. I think I was waiting for a reaction. Sadly, he was probably used to it, so he didn't react much.

I remember a friend wanted us to reenact The Lion King 2 while watching it. I was really reluctant to do this, but she wouldn't watch the movie otherwise.

Ah yeah, I think I was looking for a reaction too. I was extremely hyper and constantly bored.

When I reenacted shows I did it with stuffed animals, it never crossed my mind to do it myself, I would have been reluctant as well.

I remember a lot of the time I would run back and forth across the house and slam myself into walls and things. That was fun for me. I also would hold a hand mirror at waist height above my feet, look down into it, and pretend I was walking on the ceiling. Does that count as imagination?

Haha, dunno. I guess the mirror would make it look that way, so it would be an illusion. Think that might've made me queasy if I did that.

I've always been big into fantasy and stuff, but I do notice that I have problems with verbal fluency. Like if somebody asked me something like, "Think of 5 things that X," I would struggle to come up with those 5 things. I could perhaps easily do the first and maybe the second, but from about the third one on, I'd be struggling. I've dealt with this with my dad a lot, which makes interacting with him sometimes unpleasant; he likes testing my verbal fluency for some reason.

My imagination is associated with reality. I don't make things up when I play, I reenact real life.