Sleeping patterns

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Pretty much this.

I have no problems sticking to a fairly normal 24-hour sleep schedule, but when I'm completely unconstrained (which has been a while - think high school summer breaks) I'd rotate around, going to bed later and later, until the sun would be up before I went to bed and I'd just stay up all day and start all over again. I work nights fairly regularly and have little to no problem swinging around the clock, as long as I can get enough sleep at the right times.

Lately I've been waking up in the middle of the night (3-4am) feeling like I have to jump out of bed and start running. Happens about every other night now. I've managed to stay in bed and go back to sleep after a few minutes so far but not sure how long I'll be able to.

I can understand that. For some reason I hate to go to bed so I stay up later than I mean to. No matter how much sleep I get, when I wake up I don't want to get out of bed.

I can and often do operate on a 30 to 36 hour schedule and thats the only way I get anywhere near 8 hours of sleep, usually 7 1/2 maximum. If I have to work on a 24 hour schedule I only sleep 4 to 4 1/2 hrs.

If I get sick thats the only time I sleep what is considered a normal schedule.

my normal routine would be like 7 hours of sleep, getting up around 2pm and to bed again let's say around 5am or later (love to watch sunrise without any nightly sleep before). this pattern is not possible because of my everyday life and i suffer from that a lot. most people think it's strange and "you need daylight" and stuff but i need my nights and i don't understand what's wrong with that.

I tend to stay up late and wake up late and nap after work a lot. I dont really like it, but somehow I keep slipping into that pattern. I also find that I dont get a good quality sleep because of my roommates, so that I hopefuly fix this problem when I can get more privacy of my own home.

When I have multiple days off in a row (rare) I do notice that my bedtime will creep later and later each night, resulting in hitting snooze more and more each morning. But I have no issue adjusting really for work. My only issue comes if I have to get up unusually early for something. It's hard for me to go to bed early unless I've had several days to try to shift my sleep cycle back. To date, I have not accomplished this satisfactorily.

I think most people have trouble doing this. If you are naturally a night person, it is likely that you will start staying up later and later every night if you can. As a night person, I have trouble getting up early, even if I have to do it several days in a row.
Your body adjusts to a pattern, so if you always set the alarm for 7:00, after awhile you will start waking up just before the alarm goes off; and if you get up in the middle of the night once, the next night you may probably wake up at the same time. However, for me, it is not easy to get up early. It is actually easier for me to get up at 4 am than at 6 am. I think it has something to do with adrenaline. When I was a kid, we got up at 4 am to go to Disneyland once. Now I associate getting up extremely early with an adventure.

Is it autism or are we just not getting enough sleep?

I think that whenever a person is diagnosed with any condition, they have a tendency to blame everything on that condition. When I read the wiki article about the non-24 hour sleep pattern, it didn't mention autism but it did state that it was a neurological condition caused by genetic abnormalities so it would be easy to make the connection. The article also said that it affects mostly blind people, and most blindness is not caused by neurological abnormalities, so someone needs to check the accuracy of that article. The American Sleep Association says there is no cure but treatment with melatonin sometimes helps. My son definitely has non-24. Today he got up at 2 am. In about a week, he will be getting up at normal times.
There is another more common syndrome called delayed sleep phase and I think that I have that. It is the inability to fall asleep at a normal time and then problems getting up. It is very common in teenagers, but in adults it is thought to be associated with a gene and it runs in families, like autism. It is thought to be due to an abnormal response to daylight. I think that in my case I might have it because I had vision problems when I was little. It is related to non-24, and a person with delayed sleep phase can develop non-24.

Low melatonin levels is common in people with ASDs. Since melatonin is the main regulator of sleep a deficiency is likely to be a cause of abnormal sleep patterns.

The more difficult part is to establish the nature of the link between ASD and low melatonin levels. This Study suggests a link with a certain gene that is more common in people with ASD and low melatonin levels, however the gene they identified is also found in non-ASD relatives (who also have low melatonin levels). It does seem likely that low melatonin levels is a contributing factor to ASDs.

naturally I revert to sleeping once every 24 hours.

However, I have tried nearly every schedule from sleeping once every 2 days to sleeping twice a day.
both have worked equally well, in the context of "do i get enough sleep"

naturally, i prefer 11 hours of sleep a day.

*i was born and raised in the PWN, where the sun doesn't shine that much. for the last 3 years, i worked odd hours and didn't get much sunlight. Even if i worked during the day, it was working inside what you could call shipping containers, and sunlight was limited to less than 2 hours per day.

I work from home and do nearly this - it's 4:42 am and I haven't been to bed yet. :\ I tend to get to sleep anywhere between 1 am and 6 am. My son is the same way.

I agree it is very difficult to function within the confines of the daytime scheduled world. I have a bad time worrying about an appointment if it's coming up - even if it's in the afternoon. I can't tell what the day or days before will be like and often I'll find myself getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep and trying to force myself to make it to the appointment very tired and miserable and feeling ill.

I used to work at a place that had flex time - you could come to work anytime between 7 am and 10 am. Being a late riser, I always chose the latter. I had a boss that used to schedule meetings at 7 am and I was forced to come in early to attend. This was so hard to do. Any time that I have to use an alarm clock I can't sleep knowing that it will go off. If I have a morning appointment, I am always afraid that I will oversleep.
My son has a lot of trouble making appointments because he doesn't know what his schedule will be like on the day of the appointment. Often, he just won't go to bed until after the appointment, even if it means staying up more than 20 hours.
I never know when it is a good time to call my son, because I don't know if I will wake him. I can't rely on him if I need him because he might not be awake and might not pick up the phone.
If I lived alone, I would probably have weirder hours. I stay up late, but usually not later than 2 am, and I am usually up at 10 am.

In the year 2011, I was awake for 26+hrs on 178 non-consecutive days. Currently I've been up for 48hrs. I have an uncontrollable desire to stay up as long as possible every night. My parents said I was like that from the crib. It is the only issue that has troubled my carreer; lucky I'm as good as they get in my field, so they let me do what ever I want.

EvilGools

I absolutely have this problem. I can be going to bed or getting up at just about any time of the day. Last "night" I went to sleep at 1 in the afternoon and got up at 8:30pm. I actually went to a sleep clinic for an unrelated problem (apnea) and they asked me about my schedule and became rude with me when I told them I don't really have one.

I couldn't believe the sleep clinic wasn't familiar with this, and I'm easily able to control it and adjust it whenever I want, just by getting a short sleep. Didn't seem very professional that they didn't know about this and that they acted like I was just making something up (when I wasn't even there for that, but they kept demanding that I explain my schedule, which I kept trying to do, only to be met with disbelief), so, I went back to my doctor and got a different referral. And at the next place I was very careful to explain it wasn't a problem I was seeking help with, although they were familiar with it and offered help anyway (no cure, they said, but there are techniques to cope with it etc, but I'm coping just fine).

Anyway the secret to controlling schedule if you have this problem, if I need to adjust my schedule it's just a matter of taking a nap of a couple of hours instead of a full 7 or 8 hour sleep. It took me a long time to realize this, though, and the adjustment is a bit painful - you wouldn't want to have to make an adjustment when you've got a busy day the next day, because it works by making you very tired and craving sleep all day, so that you can go to sleep whenever you permit yourself to. Nonetheless on 24 hours notice its not that difficult. In fact I'd say I'm more flexible than most people, because of having to adapt to this. Working swing shifts is really easy for me.