the world is really there

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ok, i'm not sure if this topic goes here or not, but i put it here to see if anyone had this experience and if it is maybe autism related.

i have a weird memory from my childhood of looking out the window of the car as my mom was driving me somewhere and it suddenly hit me that the world, everything i saw out there was really there, that it was all real, that the world existed as something outside of myself. it shocked me for some reason, and was a bit terrifying. i was in early elementry school age i think. i remember this very distinctly and i remember it happened several times, as i'd "forget" or something. i don't know if i was just absorbed in my own world as a child or what.

i don't know how to describe it better than that, so sorry if that makes absolutely no sense to anyone.

I've had those moments also where I've come to realize the reality of "other things" so to speak.

I think most people including NTs fail to fully acknowledge the reality they live in most of the time and only catch glimpses of it here and there.

Human mortality and the harsh reality of existance are not very nice subjects so most people never realize them at all.

The rest just kind of catch the edge of it here and there at best but mostly just react to stimuli in a Pavlovian fashion that makes you question the validity of even calling them self-aware.

jnet,

I think the only autistic thng about that is remembering the event.

It is almost like in the films about helen keller where helen, acting as a stupid nasty brat that didn't want to be bothered, all of the sudden REALIZES that thee is a cause and effect between the actions she feels, and the events! She then runs around checking things, and waiting for a response, and THAT is how she learned to communicate.

Steve

I have many more feelings and memories of the world seeming flat(two dimensional)and not real.This is really bad when looking out moving cars.I used to keep my nose in a book until I could get out and feel the ground and smell the woods and feel the rocks.I hated being shut off from my senses...very scary.It probably didnt help that the church I was raised in told us that the physical world was an illusion....hello....very literal aspie here!! !

i often do that to. i could be sitting anywhere(mostly outside) and i realize...wow, the world is really here. i often wish i had a camera to capture those moments of realization but...i have no camera! i can't wait till christmas!

for now i just draw or write however i'm feeling at that moment.

Wait a minute.... you guys aren't really the product of my delusional mind?

Well, so much for that theory. <goes back to the drawing board, which IS the product of delusional mind>

Actually, this happens to me every once in a while. I also catch myself doing a quick spot-check to make sure I'm actually seeing/hearing what is real, as opposed to what I think I'm seeing/hearing. Haven't done this in a while, but I remember I was particularly careful about it when I answered the phone and it was for my Mom. She'd go back and pick up the phone in her room, and I would always stay on the line an extra second or so to make sure that she had actually picked up, rather than me just thinking about her saying "Hyello?"

When I was a child, I thought the world was some kind of 'Matrix' like existence (this was years before the film). I felt that other people were a test to see how I would react, or possibly 'paid' to be nice to me. I really couldn't figure out that other people actually 'existed' in the same way I did. It blew my mind when I began to realise this. To think that they experience things in the same way I do!

I still don't think animals really exist in the same way humans do. They just machines, kind of like us, but they don't have thoughts and feelings or free will like we do.

Emma.

I'd have to disagree with you... I know my pets have emotions, and they have some sort of thought process. Surely not at our level, but it's there.

Emma,

I will NEVER understand that line of thinking! NEVER!! !! ! Other animals are often SO much like humans, mentally, its scary. Animals HAVE been caught conveying emotion and descriptions through sound! Sounds like language to me, even if it IS rudimentary! Animals CAN think! They have emotions and even some abstract thought, etc... Sorry, but it is fact!

I laid out a little test for my aunt that thinks as you. And SHE didn't believe, and STILL doesn't!! I pretended to throw a ball, and the dog started to go, and then realized it was tricked. I did it again, and she didn't act so much. I did it again, and she just looked at me. And she seemed a bit upset. I threw it, and she went after it.

She EXPECTED me to throw the ball!
She ANTICIPATED my throwing the ball!
She REALIZED I wasn't likely to throw the ball!
She seemed UPSET!
She wanted to PLAY!

BTW I tried the same thing LATER(some time later in fact), and SHE LEARNED! She didn't anticipate! She just looked at me as if to say "Why are you taunting me again"?

Yet with ALL that you can sit there and think they don't think? MAN what hubris! Oh well, my aunt still doesn't, and she LOVED that dog! I guess she always thought it was just some mindless toy, and loved it like a stuffed bear.

BTW Romansch is a VERY old language, yet a LOT sounds new! A lot IS new! WHY? Because IT was an overly simplistic language also, because they didn't have to worry about many things, and a LOT of things weren't invented yet, so it has borrowed lots of words. Then again, English doesn't even have its own word for a fully enclosed space for a car! It BORROWED the word "garage" from french! So the idea of a rudimentary language really isn't THAT primitive. Besides, it seems to work for all their needs.

BTW Animals HAVE been caught using tools to make tools ALSO! Chimps, for example, have been caught breaking stones to sharpen twigs to get at things. Even SEAGULLS have been caught dropping seafood to the ground to break shells!

NPR(national public radio in the US) spoke a few days ago about how some crows showed FANTASTIC ingenuity and thought! They take nuts, drop them on the street, wait for a car to run over them, wait for the light to stop the cars, and then get the meat from the cracked nuts! Is all that instinct????

I MYSELF noticed this earlier with squirells. I guess they loved to live on one side of the street, but wanted something on the other. Earlier, I HAD noticed some scurrying across the street, which is on the dangerous side. They found a way around it, and I noticed this a LOT! They would scurry up a telephone pool, walk a wire to the other side, and then scurry down! They used our telephone network as a kind of pedestrian bridge! How can THAT be? Do you realize what that must look like to a squirrel? That any creature can look at something so relatively gigantic and make sense out of it is remarkable in itself.

Steve

It was a very shocking realization that came to me when I was 10. The world I was living in was not my world; I was just passing guest in the reality of the daily life, controlled by my parents and teachers. The animals on the streets weren't there for me to look at and feed. City streets, with their sights and sounds, weren't for me to walk around and explore. Stores weren't there so I could look at all the merchandise. City buses weren't there for me to ride around in. Other people weren't just automatons that were simply there; they could think and feel just like me, and some could be capable of bullying. As Ephemera pointed out, my Matrix-like vision of the world around me crashed and burned. As self-centered as it may sound, that's how I perceived the world as a young kid. Shortly after I turned 10, I had all these realizations, and it was a huge psychological shock. As a result, I suffered depression (fortunately, relatively mild) for six months.

Jnet, I have experienced this while I am also a teenager. I remember playing basketball and I would suddenly go into my own world and come back in, it was terrifying but amusing at the same time.

This is normal

One of the most interesting "discoveries" I made from an early age is that events continued to occur when they were out of my sight. For example, If I'm looking at a street, and an automobile comes driving down the road. That automobile dissapears around the next curve or hill. To me, it was gone, didn't exist anymore, or it may have existed, but since it was out of my sight, it's animation ceased. Now, If I traveled down that road past the curve or hill that limited my sight, then whatever is within my sight was once again animated at that new location. Even once I realized that things occured outside of my view, it was still hard to imagine so much that was going on in the world, for example, when I would see pictures of other nations on the other side of the world, it seemed like it was just "down the street"

As I got older, my reference for size and distance slowly increased. I used to think that the grocery store I rode to with mom was rather far away because it was out of walking distance, and we had to drive there in the car. It was only a few miles down the road however. Today, I take trips all over the state, and feel that it's nothing to go 100 miles in a day's time. Suddenly that grocery store that seemed so far away is now extremely close!

Another insteresting concept I didn't grasp till I was in my young teens is the presence of light for an action to occur. Imagine if you will, a running dishwasher, and what's going on inside it. There's water and soap splashing around all over the place. Now, within that visualization, you probably see it illuminated. However, inside your dishwasher, it's completely dark. There's no light inside illuminating it while it's doing it's thing...it doesn't need one! Just like humankind tends to slow down depending on the level of light in our environment, I sort of imagined everything in the world not occuring unless there was avaliable light.

I remember this happening a few years ago. I had gotten really into playing The Sims and played for several hours a day. After a few days of that, I was having lunch with my family when suddenly I realized that I existed and everyone around me did too, and I wasn't just controlling everything like on The Sims.

Actually real life isn't too far from The Sims. You choose your actions on your surroundings, and they react. The only difference is that you can't control other people directly and you have emotions that affect your decisions.