my daymares... Sensory Overload?

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This is my first time posting... I'm on a journey to find some answers. With recent dealings with my doctor and psychologist Asperser’s has been brought up. I am now waiting in line to see a specialist... which may take a few months.

I have a question: when I was little (starting at the age of 3) I started experiencing episodes of sensory overload or what I called my "daymares". I would wake up from sleep but I would still be caught in a dream state. I would have numbers counting in my head to infinity, sound reverbed/distorted, my sight was also altered (seeing colour from sound, the air becoming texturized - ripples, waves, etc). I seriously thought I was going mad when these episodes happened and I would lose control. My parents told me I would freak out, go all "wild-eyed" and it would take a few hours for me to calm down and for the effects to dissipate. These episodes happened several times a year until I was about 13 when I was able to detect and reduce the effects if not stop it from happening. For the most part, I would awaken to my "daymare" but the older I got the more it happened while I was awake.
Has anyone experienced something like this when they were a child? Any theories? Ideas?

So I am the only one who remotely experienced such episodes as a child? Has anyone experienced anything close to what I described?
Any feedback/comments would be appreciated..

I didn't have anything like this as a kid, although it sounds really scary. What I did have was extremely realistic nightmares. They often would take place in my own apartment (!), with almost every object being exactly as in real life. When the morning would come, I'd be terrified of going to the room in the apartment where the nightmare took place, and my parents would spend 20 minutes explaining everything. And every time, the nightmare consisted of either one of the following.

I'm in a dark room. A scary sound comes from a distant corner. I'm trying to turn on the lights, but the switch doesn't work. Meanwhile, the sound continues.

I'm in a room; lighting conditions vary. The chandelier (normally medium-sized) is huge and has pointy spikes coming out of it. Sometimes it moves around the ceiling and/or howls.

I'm trying to watch TV, but instead of showing cartoons, it only hisses and buzzes loudly, showing static on the screen; the controls don't work, and it won't turn off.

I'm walking through the long, narrow hall, trying to get to the kitchen. But the hall continues on and on, never ending. Running doesn't help at all.

I'm in a large room with a closed door. I get uneasy, and decide to leave that room. But when I go toward the door, the doorknob (lever-type) start spinning around.

I'm inside an elevator in my building. The lights are on, but it's not moving. I try to press the "call" button, but the control panel has been removed. Ugly wires are visible in its place.

I discover that the chandelier doesn't look right (see #2), and get scared. I try going to a different room to avoid the scary-looking thing, but it's in every room.

The telephone rings every few minutes, then briefly goes silent, then starts ringing somewhere else. I want to disconnect the phone line, but get too scared to come near the phone.

Don't ask me how my mind could have made up this bizarre crap. It was hard living as a child with Asperger's syndrome as it is. These nightmares were scary not in spite of being in my own apartment, but because of that. It was wondering every time whether it's a dream or real.

This so sounds like me as a child weird. I member one particular freak out episode I ran out side and down the street screaming hysterically. Upon gazing up at the street light my sensory problems went into overdrive and I went into a hysteric trance. During my more peaceful episodes I always saw color light bubbles and waves of speech and I swear I saw the dead and heard them too. I was about 10 when everything wasn’t so aggravating to my senses.

When I was little, my nightmares were really weird and scary. Usually, they consisted of one of the following scenarios, or, occasionally, a mixture of more than one:

I'm in toys R Us with my family. Suddenly, one of the huge ceiling vents roars as soon as I walk under it, and I get scared.

I'm in this room with another room behind a glass wall. The room behind the glass wall has ceiling vents scattered all over the floor, and another ceiling vent dangling over an abandoned kiosk. The vents make groaning noises when I walk into that room.

I'm in my own bedroom at nighttime, and one of the curtains becomes alive, makes weird noises, and attempts to tickle me to death. I try to run, but my legs weigh a thousand pounds.

I'm in my former high school, and the ground foundation around the school collapses from being frozen in icy snow, and the school crashlands into a body of water. The school starts to sink, there are no lifeboats, and the water is only 2 degrees Fahrenheit!

I'm in Lechmere with my family, and one of the ceiling vents acts really weird and makes weird noises.

I'm in my house at nighttime. All the lights in the house are working fine. When I go into my bedroom, however, I try to turn on the light, but it comes on way too dim and shines red!

I'm in this mall, and the lights don't look right. The chandeliers look like they have droopy doggy ears, and the standard BJ's-type ceiling lights change brightness every two seconds.

Again, I'm in a mall, this time a different one, and the stores have really weird ceiling vents that change shape, from circle to square, and back every hour.

I've had a lot of really vivid nightmares in my life. Like the ones where I get bitten by a snake that comes out of nowhere...in most of them, I try to scream, but it comes out as a whisper, and scares the hell out of me. As to having nightmares in the daytime, I don't know if that's ever happened to me, but I've had panic attacks and sensory overloads. Usually I'm just a big grump around everyone and my brain kinda shuts down if I have a sensory overload...nothing too trippy like the thing you described. So, sorry if this information isn't what you needed.

My 11 yr old was just diagnosed aspie with sensory integration trouble. I had no idea until reading this post that they were connected and not 2 seperate issues. I've known of the sensory overload since he was 2 or 3 (can't go to WalMart!), but last fall he woke up at 5am very upset. When he saw his little brothers he bagan screaming, ran back to his room and literally piled furniture in front of the door. It took me 20 minutes to push the stuff out of the way enough to get into his room and try to figure out what was going on, but as soon as he saw me he started shrieking louder. It took 3 hrs to calm him down. He told us later that he could hear all of our voices, but all he coud see were giant moths attacking him. This all happened before we had any clue about Asperger's or how severe his sensory problems were, luckily what helped him calm down was us telling him to close his eyes and just listen to my voice. What a scary morning that was for all of us.

*edited---sorry

Stereokid, your stories are very interesting. It's amazing how similar they are to my nightmares. I only posted a few, but I actually had tons of similar nightmares. I still get uneasy when sleeping in a room with a chandelier in it, even though they don't scare me anymore.

Throughout my childhood, I felt the same way about chandeliers, especially the ones in my apartment. I read a thread titled "Ceiling Fans" in the General Discussion forum, and realized something: my mind probably found something unsettling about a large stationary object hanging on my ceiling. I've been seeing moving ceiling fans all my childhood, and they didn't bother me one bit. Chandeliers, on the other hand, just hung there, so... <shudders in fear>.

It looks like the big ceiling vents are the focus of your nightmares. My guess is your mind found something unsettling about a circular metal object appearing on the ceiling. It could have been their large size, the holes between the round metal parts, or their metal color against a white ceiling. Whatever it was, your brain didn't like it. Ah, the wonders of Asperger's never cease to amaze me.

I had a little bit of Mt. Dew (not even enough to fill a can) yesterday and I went pretty much crazy and thought invisible people were trying to kill me. Yeah...not good. I don't know whether that classifies as a "daymare", but it really sucked. No more Mt. Dew for me for awhile, though, that much I know. Caffeine + AS = crazyness... I never had that happen to me before, though, and I've been drinking Mt. Dew for as long as I can remember. Can anybody explain...?