Dreaming

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I have heard that people with AS don't have as many dreams, but I don't know if it's true. I couldn't follow the article very well because it was extremely scientific and hard to understand.

I tend to remember my dreams about 2-4 a week.

Lucid dreaming: I have had lucid dreams, however, when I have them, if I try to wake myself up or something, I can't. I realize I am dreaming but I am unable to control my actions, even when I try.

I dream every night, I remember most of my dreams. Some of them are pretty fantastic and filled with amazing elements, some are pretty mundane.

I remember reading something somewhere that said autistic people primarily dream about things like going shopping or making a sandwich, but even my most mundane dreams involve actual conflict and the occasional plot. Mostly, they're about the fact that I feel like I have practically no personal space.

Edit: I have had lucid dreams as well. I don't really use lucid dreaming to do much, I mainly just let the dreams play out. I don't really have many nightmares, so that doesn't come up, but one of my favorite dreams was defusing a nightmare with lucid dreaming.

Last edited by Verdandi on 01 Feb 2011, 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I had a sleep study where they woke me up in every possible sleep stage and asked if I remembered dreaming and to write down any dreams. No matter which stage of sleep, I always remembered detailed dreams. I've also dreamed lucidly since childhood although at this point all I use it for is increased control over nightmares. I found that thinking about my dreams all the time wasn't good for my mental health, which is why I quit concentrating on doing even more with lucid dreaming. I always remember dreams then usually make a decision about how much detail to remember.

(And before anyone says dreams are only in REM sleep that's been shown inaccurate long ago, it's just more likely people dream or remember dreams in that stage.)

I dream every night. Most times, I dream mostly of colours, rhythm and sounds, but sometimes I'll have a dream that is like people normally have. I will nine times out of ten prefer my rhythm dreams over that though.

a lot of my dreams look like they were shot on super-8 film very home movie looking. I wake up several times a night but I usually remember the dream I have before I wake.

I dream every night. I remember dreaming every day, but usually my memory fades almost instantly.

My dream state is unusual. I'm usually half aware that I'm not in the real world, and I have some control over my environment. It's not quite a lucid dreaming state. It's more like I'm writing a script and I have to follow it, but I have some control over what direction its going. My dreams borrow a lot from TV and movies that I have seen.

I enjoy my dreams quite a bit. They are a lot of fun. I only have bad dreams when I have a fever. If I don't have a fever, then I have enough control over the environment and enough awareness that I am able to avoid unpleasant dreams.

I have had a few lucid dreams, but normally I don't do anything special in them.

I know I dream every night, but I don't always remember the details of my dreams. The majority of dreams I have are variations on similar themes (going to junior high/elementary school, going to the mall, living in a videogame or becoming friends again with my former childhood friend).

I have been lucid dreaming regularly since the middle of last year. It usually happens when I start having a nightmare. I try desperately to wake myself up by throwing myself down flights of stairs and against the floor in the hopes that the "jolt" will wake me up, but it never works. Then I begin screaming in my sleep for one of my parents, hoping that one of them will hear me and wake me up. This doesn't work either because at that stage of sleep I'm experiencing sleep paralysis, so even though I'm trying to scream, my mouth doesn't move. The only thing that has a chance of working is if I try to change the content of the dreams to something more neutral. I'd say this has about a 45% chance of working for me.

However, lucid dreaming doesn't always happen during nightmares for me. Sometimes it happens when I am dreaming about something very wonderful but unlikely to occur in the waking world. For example, sometimes I have dreams about being friends with my favorite celebrities (usually Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, but sometimes Johnny Depp instead). I will be so happy that I'll think some variation of, "this is too good to be true", and then I will realize that I am only dreaming and Tim and Helena (and/or Johnny) will disappear into a fog as though they were apparitions. I beg them not to go, but they always do. Then I spend some dreaming time feeling angry at myself for allowing that to happen before I move on to the next dream.

I thought dreams were something that always occur as part of a normal sleep cycle (and, as anbuend points out, not exclusively in REM). Assuming an AS person has normal sleep cycles (and I see no reason why we wouldn't) then we should have the regular amount of dreams. What's the article you're reading?

There have been times when I've remembered my dreams a lot and times when I barely ever. Right now I'm not remembering many.

I practiced lucid dreaming for a while and I loved it. I wasn't terribly creative when it came to controlling them. I always went for flying or fornication, and on one memorable occasion both. Nevertheless, I haven't tried in a few years. Don't really know why not.

@ocdgirl123 I wonder why you're having trouble trying to control your actions in your lucid dreams? When I think about it, I haven't really tried to control my actions so much as the dream itself. I wonder if that makes a difference.

I dream every night and I remember my dreams as well. My dreams are anything but mundane. I have dreams about issues that I'm working out. They're not nightmares. They're more educational than anything. I also have vivid dreams about my special interests. My dreams are very interesting.

Oh I forgot to mention something weird. Often my dreams have been so far away from ordinary life that there's no way to easily communicate them. Even when they have plots they're usually disjointed and weird. Except...

Now I am on (past few years) a new combination of seizure/neuralgia meds. And. My dreams have plots. Detailed plots. Like science fiction novels. And while I used to experience waking up and sleeping my way back into roughly the same dream... now it's uncanny. Now I land right on target exactly where I left off in the plot.

And they're not just sci fi plots. Generally they're long detailed sci fi plots. And bad one's. Most of the time they would make for terrible stories.

They have one more odd feature which is nightmare elements without the nightmare. Such as exhuming dead bodies with no fear or disgust until I wake up and go WTF?! On rare occasions they will be scary but frequently they are truly gruesome yet without the usual emotional reaction. This too only since the seizure meds.

More info:

My dreams are usually crazy, tragic or relevant to what is currently going on in my life. I once had this:

I was at a concert and the band's lead singer was singing a song about a guy with a green boat and the bass player turned th sprinklers on! The next day,I went to an assembly at my school. After School, I was watched the band's stage manager order the band's bass player to stay where he was, when suddenly, he remember that he had left his bass at the concert hall and started snowboarding on the grass! He went up the wall on the snowboard and went into the concert hall. We searched high and low for that bass, but all we could find was the school instruments. The concert took place at my school and the band in it is actually a real band.

DrS, I looked and can't find the article, I don't even know if it's on the internet anymore. I read it a few years ago, but the study was from the late 90's, so it's a bit older and that could be why it said that.

It depends.

Times when I'm having trouble sleeping - when RLS is playing up especially as it prevents me sleeping deeply enough to dream or when I am having a very 'aspie period' where I'm stressed my mind just goes off the rail a little so I don't dream. If I'm having a good day and getting normal sleep then I dream every night and remember my dreams to the point where I often go back to sleep to get back into the dream after I wake up; full sensory lucid dreams mean fun dreams - as I've probably mentioned, I always have at least one dream about zombies or losing my teeth when I do dream too.

Interesting. I actually dream more when I am stressed.

I was on an SSRI once that I don't even remember the name of that gave me extremely vivid, strongly plotted dreams where events clearly chained from one to the next. I stopped taking it when it caused homicidal ideation and nose bleeds from high blood pressure.

But I do miss the dreams. They were vividly detailed as well, I could focus in on anything to extreme detail, to the point of - on a beach - seeing individual grains of sand.

I actually managed to remember one of those hypnagogic dreams once, and it's an amazing memory visually, and was like... The best I can describe was that it was about life reaching for other planets, but didn't involve a space age. That's really oversimplified and utterly fails to get the point of what it was- most of it I can't even put into words. If I could draw, maybe pictures, but it was intense and strange, and I wish I could remember more of them.

I'm the same way!

I am typically a lucid or semi-aware dreamer. In my youth, I had absolute control over my dream content during lucidity. Now, I try to make things happen, but they won't most of the time. It's like reality . . . I wonder if it has something to do with the adult mindset.

I always remember my dreams. They are often stories. I jot down notes because I'm convinced I'm actually going to write them someday.

I had vivid nightmares as a child and one of my coping strategies was dream control, so I developed lucidity slightly before age 3. I love dreaming.

Feel ya, I think. I dream quite often of the macro-level world on a micro-level scale, as if we could manipulate our atoms enough to where we could crawl through air and stretch out into space and become fluid or gaseous or anything in between if we willed it hard enough.

My dreams are usually quite fantastical and surreal. They do borrow elements from real life but are usually long with several different scenes. Sometimes I dream I am viewing myself from outside, other times I am me but am not who I am when awake. Most times they are partially lucid, as in I have options and come to realizations that I can be in control of things while I am in the dream. Most of the time I have superhuman powers.

When I was younger, I dreamt nearly every night of a world of pure nerve connections and I and all others were pieces flowing through this world that I desperately wanted to break out of, and it was all controlled by a mastermind that took different forms. Sometimes the master was an animal, sometimes a gruesome face, but we were all tied to this system and had to keep flowing through its networks.

I think I was dreaming about neurology even from an early age