Childhood Imagination + Lack of?

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Okay I sometimes lack imagination when it comes to socialising, for example I will not beable to envisage what someones reaction will be to my action and usually surmise something terrible will happen.

But it really bugs me this lack of imagination, lack of creative play is in the diagnostic criteria. During my childhood I had a vivid imagination dressing up, making dens, creating worlds. Okay I did have a strange fixation with tills, calculators and shop paraphenalia as well but is it true that Aspie kids don't just collect toys, line up cars, play chess and have a rich imagination too. If we don't have imagination how the hell could Lewis Carroll and Orson Welles have had AS!! !

Please share what your childhood games were and if you enjoyed any imaginative play.

Hmm.
I know I did not play well with other children. According to my mother, I was controlling when playing with others.
But I did like to escape into my own world... however, for me to create my own world, I needed the fantasy books I read, and the fantasy films I watched for source material, lol. I couldn't simply create an imaginary world of my own making.
But I did like to go into my room and imagine all sorts of scenarios and would have my dolls enacting them...yes, I did have dolls.
I also liked to put on music and dance around imagining I was holding hands with other imaginary children.
Besides that, I don't think I was especially imaginative. I liked to line up my cuddly toys and build lego and explore things more than anything... oh, and read.

Were we separated at birth or something? This was pretty much my experience also.

Orson Welles was an Aspie? Really? I hadn't heard that one- can someone give me a source backing up this claim? As a creature of cinema, I can't let this slip through my fingers.

There is a book out that proposes that certain creative figures had AS and that goes into exploring evidence of why this is believed. I forget the title but I have it here somewhere in a box. Will have a look later. Of course, unless one could perform a post death diagnosis, no-one can ever be certain. It is just a psychologist/psychiatrist exploring evidence that suggests certain people had AS. It is quite an interesting read actually.

Oh, I had lots of imagination as a child, building fantasy worlds in my mind and imagining fantasy families and aliens from outer space. I also used to like building things with blocks but never really pretended they were anything else. I knew it was just blocks but the towers or "robots" looked nice.

I don't think I had the sort of imagination that could work out other people's reactions to what I did or said as it was like watching a movie all the time with people mostly acting unpredictably.

I used to play a lot with my younger brother and sister. We played house, store, school, and work.
For store, I ran a shop and sold things to my brother and sister. We used a deck of cards for money.
For school where I would have one of my siblings be the teacher and assign my schoolwork to do out of some old school books we got from our school when they were throwing them out. I liked school, both real and pretend, it was one of the things I was good at.
When we played work where we would do things around the house to earn our deck of cards money to spend playing shop later. I always kept track of how much money everyone had so that the next time we played shop we knew how much we had.

I loved my legos too. Other than following the instruction sheets to build the intended object for a set, I never built much besides houses with furniture. I was pretty content to build the same set over and over again.

I had trouble playing with other kids when they wanted to play things like cops and robbers. They wouldn't play dead when they got shot. That really would frustrate me and I didn't find those sort of games fun. So I guess I was pretty controlling that way.

I really only had one friend when I was growing up. He is my next door neighbor and is an only child. I always thought that he must be lonely because he didn't have brothers and sisters to play with. His family had much more money than we did so he always got lots of really cool toys, a tree house, golf cart and a pool. I feel bad when I remember the times I went to his house more to play with his toys than to play with him. He still lives next door to me, but we kinda drifted apart around 6th grade or so.

I also liked reading. My favorites were detective stories, fact books, and fantasy. I had a period where I really liked wilderness survival type of books, Hatchet was my favorite. I used to dream of becoming stranded by myself in the wilderness and just living off the land. I still get the desire to do that now and then.

I use to play with other friends at school and we use to do different things like Star Trek, Power Rangers, Doctor Who and the Alien films we use to make out we were characters from those programmes. It was fun at home I was on my own only because it was in the middle of the country and there was no one around.

Heh, Ghostbusters was my thing, however I had 0 imagination, to the point where, and i dont think i can put this into words well... that in my head I had a picture of the white wagon they drove, and the back of it was all filthy, well... in my head, I wanted the car clean, but in the movie it was dirty, so I just imagined their was a white cloth over the back of the car that was clean, if that does not indicate 0 imagination then nothing does.

We used to play ninja turtles in the yard at school. Some would be shredder and his foot clan, and I and others the turtles, well... like most normal kids after a while it got boring, not me, I would continue to attack the bad ones, and do this every day for the whole year at this time, i got sent to the principals office 1 day for a fight, i was not fighting i was defeating the enimy, i feel bad about it, he thought i wanted to hurt him, but he was the enemy. It got so bad those foot clan kids i hated every day I saw them in school.

When pretending to be part of the election in 1992, it was my turn to go into the closet (voting booth) and choose my candadate, I was 10 years old, and went out, and they asked who I voted for, I said nobody because I could not find the pretend lever that shut the curtin. 0 imagination, hahahahah

COME ON! You are being WAY to hard on yourself! Take a look at the movies that have come out. MANY are based on EARLIER movies that are 20-30 years older! The NEW twilight zone had a LOT of old episodes, and many were WORD FOR WORD! I stayed up one night, and heard the basic script for "heaven can wait". The basic environment was changed, but much was word for word. EVEN the names! ONE PROBLEM! It WASN'T heaven can wait! It was "Here comes Mr. Jordan"!

Still more others are based on books, formats, or a common concept. Harry Potter, for example, is NOT very original! The orphan? Starving? Great heritage? Close relatives taking him as a hated stranger, even though he did right by them? Magic, wands, etc.... There are TONS of things that are far from original.

If psychiatrists mean THAT is a lack of imagination, then it is RAMPANT! At least YOU probably come up with something closer to "harry potter", which shows some effort and is a new work, rather than "heaven can wait", which borders on plagerism.

BTW In computer terms, harry potter is like normal programing. heaven can wait is simple cut/paste in a document you merely copy. What you say you lack is like designing the language you will write in, and building everything from the ground up without knowing what exists.

And building new things with legos shows worthwhile abilities and some imagination.

As a child I was generally good at drawing a copying what was in front of me like and photo from a magazine or a boatshed, but I really had to struggle with imagination if there was nothing to copy from, and I would usually draw the same thing over and over again like the side view of a steam train.

I love to draw but I kind of just copy other stuff I see, lol... sometimes I get creative and mix 2 pictures that are in front of me by hand drawing them mixed together somehow.

I had an imagination of sorts-I played with Barbies when I was around 14 or so-seems I may have hit that phase really late, lol, but I enjoyed finding odd things that could be used for other things. For instance, a semi-opened encyclopedia became a couch, closed, it was a bed... when on the side, it was a wall-things like that. When at my friend's house who had an over abundance of doll furniture, I would still use books, and rather than a car, I used a stuffed unicorn as my Barbie's mode of transportation.

Thinking back on it, I had an awesome imagination when left to my own devices... it was only a problem when it came to actually playing with other kids, lol. I just kind of... didn't really care what they were doing or why, and I liked to control how it went a lot of the time.

I remember once a friend insisted I used her doll furniture, so I got a hat, and pieces of paper. I cut them up, and wrote down each and every item of furniture she had, and we randomly drew them from the hat. We also used cards and a hat for this purpose-when one of us got a card into the hat by tossing it, we would get to pick something out, sometimes it would be so we would still have to draw it from the hat even then, lol. I was very big on things like that...

My son has big problems with figuring out what others are doing as well-what the heck they are trying to get him to do, etc., and will ask bizarre things of them sometimes in an attempt to get them to play (not really bizarre, but their reactions make it seem as if he is really out there). Both of us were/are the kind of kiddo that plays with people by playing next to them, doing our own thing, and commenting every great once in a while to them.

I did few things, that were slightly imaginative. I built a leggo tower, built a spaceship out of leggo and made a radioactive container out of leggo and dropped it down the stairs to see when it would break. Played the same way over and over for months on end.

Also, remember making a time machine in 1982, I got the seat cushions of a sofa and arranged them so I could hide inside my time machine. I remember it was 1982, as I wanted a telescope for Christmas and so I climbed into my "time machine" to speed up time, so that Christmas would arrive quicker. Oh, I used to arrange chairs into a spaceship and I would crawl inside and hide.

Allot of my play seemed to be escaping and hiding inside things. Isaac Asimov was also a claustrophile - feeling safer in small enclosed spaces.

When I was little I used to tell people I was a vampire. I used the fact that I was so bothered by sunlight to support that, and claimed that I could jump in a way that was like flying. Before bed I would imagine that I was really the son of Dracula and ruled a world of monsters. Later on as the story evolved I realized that I'm not the son of Dracula, and he was a creation of mine due to my ability to distort reality with my imagination (I really envied the abilities of Proteus as demonstrated in the animated X-Men show on FOX.) I'd accidentally associated myself with my creation and lost my identity in my own reality. It was soon after that I and my twin brother were abducted into a space ship by our real parents who explained our true identities. I belonged to a race of aliens with purple skin and two stumpy antennae on our heads (that looked strangely similar to aliens on the cover of a book I'd read.) Instead of eyelids we had skin over our eyes, but our vision was powerful enough that we could see through. At that point I would travel through different dimensions ala DC Comics or TMNT (I used to visit the TV dimension and other media-inspired dimensions frequently and meet my favorite characters from television, books and movies.)

During a youth performance of Fiddler on the Roof at a local theatre one of the other children I met on the cast agreed with me that I really am a vampire and developed the lore much further, yadda yadda yadda, the police had to be called and I wasn't welcome there ever again.

In elementary school I used to start fights with people for breaking the rules, like if someone cut in line or changed their seat during lunch. For some reason when I was in elementary school a lot of my friends were very active and athletic. They used to come play basketball at my house, but I'd just stand around and watch. One time I said I wanted to play and they all got annoyed with me. I made them all leave.

I had a few more geeky friends at that time too. Usually we'd pretend we were comic book characters or wrestlers and do battle. I used to choose really powerful characters and godmod. I got involved in text-based RP on AOL (Rhydin) when I was about 12. At first I was an elf but then I got really caught up in Dune and was Paul Muad'dib instead. There was someone who was claiming to be Paul's son and we started to RP together. But as I read more I realized his was a made up character that didn't exist in Dune continuity, so I challenged him to a battle above the sietch. I don't remember what happened to me for losing, but if he lost he had to stop playing that character.

I used to intentionally carry certain things with me (for example a particular book) that I had a sense would convey a certain message without me having to say anything, or I'd intentionally use certain words. Looking back I'm not really sure I could have conveyed some of my thoughts and feelings differently. One example is when I went to interview at a new school in the 2nd grade. It was for kids the public schools couldn't handle. I brought along a book on hominids. One time at that school for St Patrick's Day there was powder on the desks when we came back from, maybe gym, and they told us a leprechaun had visited. I sniffed it, tasted it, and told them it was baby powder. I'm also the one who told all my friends Santa Claus isn't real. I think I ended up getting suspended for a day because of what followed.

I had a very good therapist who picked up on my symbolic communication and seemed to often decipher what I was trying to say.

I wrote a lot as a child too, mostly very ordinary stuff, but some of it imaginative. I think I showed that therapist something very imaginative I'd written or explained one of the types of stories I liked to read and he mentioned a type of fiction I don't remember, but as an example he said, "The world is blue like an orange."

In my teens and onto today that line of investigation spawned a lot of weird stuff, like a fanfic very loosely based on the life of a mitnaged preacher that read like a badly-dubbed and fantastical kungfu movie, a tongue-in-cheek story about a pipe bomb made from a crust of bread (based on Potato Pancakes All Around which itself was based on Stone Soup) by a stereotypical religious Jewish family. They used it to blow up a post office (the zaide (grandfather and it seemed convenient to use it there since they were heading that way anyway.) One of the more involved of that style of writing was a poem that used techniques implemented by the biblical authors (e.g. parallelism) to tell a story about aliens, cattle mutilation and mankind's violent claim to dominance over the natural world which loosely followed the structure of the creation narrative in genesis.

I liked performing as a kid too, put on shows for my parents with my sister.

On the whole it seems most as children were creative but not imaginative. Malachi perhaps the exception that sounds like a really vivid imagination! Apparently many AS children excel at acting.
Did anyone else used to carry certain objects around with them? I went through a phase of taking my red cash box everywhere! On holiday I dropped its contents on the floor of a hotel lobby there were coppers/pennies everywhere! I also used to have a fire bag ready in my bedroom containing treasured possesions in case of fire!