Fantasy Life?

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I have read that children with Asperger's can have a strong fantasy life. What exactly does this entail? Would a fantasy world of a completely new family (parents, siblings, etc.) and spending time in solituded absorbed in this fantasy life? Would this be something an Aspie might do, or would this be another type of disorder? Thank you.

For me my phycologists thinks and maybe I do leave in my own fantasy world. Even though I'm 20 but I don't have any not any outside contacts that which I would consider friends. So I set my fantasy world with my novels and on here and my blog. Just not to face the facts that I'm real limited in what I can do. So yeah it must be something of a AS thing.

My fantasy world consists of imaginary cities

Tim

Once when I was younger I started to make up a whole town, describing each citizen on a separate index card.
But I got bored quickly.

Sounds like one of the Sim games, doesn't it?

Tim

Yeah, sort of, but they never interacted. They just coexisted.

I've always built quite elaborate cities, countries etc. in my head. The main one having stayed with me since I was fifteen or so. It's quite a pleasant pastime.

It's interesting to read that children [and adults] with AS apparently have strong fantasy lives. How does that fit in with literature suggesting people with ASD don't have "imagination", then?

I have a very strong fantasy life. I usually focus on one character and how they and others would react to the world. In a way, they are my alter-ego. I'd also create a bunch of other characters as well, plus I would also [mentally] give them indexes, i.e. age, appearance, what job[s] if any, brief family tree, etc.

I have two fantasy worlds. One is a stereotypical fantasy world [although not populated with dragons; rather largely by malevolent spirits, vampires and demons]. The other is basically a replica of this world, but as lived by my characters.

Each world has their own language, customs, cultural groups, etc

Ah yes, daydreaming. i do it all the time.

It's sad, but some children are brought here for reasons less than honorable, or for status or fulfilling god's purpose, in the case of some religions. whoah--sorry! Aspie rant.

In the case of severe abuse of title 4's it would make an interesting defense. Mama was always trying successfully to be one step ahead of me on this. However, the absence of doctors records point to something more sinister.


For those of you who do not know a title 4 adoption is a child who has been abandoned or left without family (death/jail/ect) and when such child is adopted to the us this child recieves 'as if born here' certificates. However these can be done until the age of 18. When is the popular opinion on when memory starts?

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ok. back to topic.
how old is your dear darling and what's going on with her/him to make you think such a thing?

And most of all--don't take offense!

I like to do such things as wonder "what if anything does the raccoon think about".

Maybe your baby (age?) is imagining what 'you' think about and overlaying it into his characters.

I'd have a hard time imagining parents-when we did this as children we used stuffed animals ESPECIALLY so the parents wouldn't know what we were talking about. But, maybe that is this kids bent. He could just be trying to play out a social situation outside of himself to help him figure out a social situation he is presently in.

Again, if that is what he/she is doing don't take offense! I'm sure your baby still loves you--he may just be trying to figure out an aspect of something he can't figure out within a NT framework. Read read read!

I wish you the best of luck~tell us more.

My fantasy's mostly included animals: real or mythical; with such context's as found on theives world or in the time of alaya from clan of the cave bear. Current fantasy's lulled with middle age.

When I was a kid, I had an extremely rich fantasy life. I actually posted a thread on a similar topic in the Parents' Forum. I essentially transformed my daily life into a video game. I was vaguely based on the not-yet-existing The Sims and SimCity, combined with various features from Super Mario Brothers and Arkanoid. (Details are shown below, just for fun.)

For your enjoyment, here are a few aspects of the game. Keep in mind, they're about the game, not life as NTs see it.
I was the main character in the game, nagivating the everyday world.
Each place was a "location," such as school, home, friends' homes, relatives' homes, city streets, stores, public monuments, city buses, parks, etc. was classified as friendly, neutral, hostile, and very hostile.
Each person was an "inhabitant" of a particular location, and categorized as friendly, neutral, hostile, and very hostile. Some inhabitants could move between locations, like my parents, while others couldn't, like the store clerks. This is one of the reasons why I had difficulty with seeing people outside the usual context, such as seeing my teacher in a store.
I earned "life points" for doing things that helped me get praise from parents and teachers and let me avoid bullying; I lost "life points" for doing things that got me punished or bullied. For example, getting a good grade meant earning points (result: praise from the teacher and no punishment at home), while giving an overly pedantic answer in class meant losing points (result: bullying during lunch)
Some locations were time-driven, like my school, with classes, breaks, and a lunch; some were event-driven, like my home where I had to clean my room in order to watch TV; some were free-running, like my friends' apartment where I could simply be. Different locations fit into a different category, based on the criteria I assigned.
Each location had its own "obstacles," which were people or objects designed to get in the way of my game. My apartment had a chandelier I was scared of, my school had bullies, city streets had moving cars, stores had displays I couldn't touch, etc.
Each year of my life was treated a "level." Turning a year older was the same as passing a level in the game.
Sleep was a means of fast-forwarding the boring parts of the game. In other words, instead of just lying in bed for 8 hours, that time would go by in just 90 minutes, the time it took me to fall asleep.
And so much more, it would boggle an NT's mind.

How's that for fantasy life?

Then nothing you did could affect the time your level changed.

After reading all your posts, my game wouldn't really count as a fantasy life. I never got to playing with the characters: I made them up and then got bored of them.

That sort of sounds a lot like me with pen-and-paper role-playing games... the games were mostly an excuse for me to create people, cities, worlds, ecosystems, and universes, then list "meaningless" details about them, figure out how they all interact with each other, and file them all away because they never really got used by anyone but me... which was OK, and my decision entirely: I never felt like anyone else could understand them the way I could. (Not to mention that I was always too slow, socially, to get much use from all that information during the game, anyway.)

For example, for a sci-fi/military game, I invented for my character an (entirely un-necessary) chain of command and military beaurocracy and government with individual people in as many positions as I could imagine, and created backgrounds for all of them, and then wrote memos back and forth between them, and monthly newspapers/programs with different reporters writing their own opionions writing editorials concerning different government policies or about different fads or art movements or new music styles and so on. My character might spend the night of gaming depressed or frustrated and confused, and nobody but me would ever know that it was because there was a crackdown on discipline following a scandalous office party at the Ministry of Manufacturing Registration which made an admiral look foolish. Or that my character had just come back from eating at a restaurant where he just had a look at the latest fashion statement being made by fans of an obnoxious new style of music. I would sometimes mention some of those little details, and the other players and the DM seemed to think I was improvising that sort of thing off the top of my head, and I never really made any effort to convince them otherwise.

Of course, this would inevitably reach a point where there was too much information to juggle, and I would eventually "burn out" on a given subject. Then I would shut down for a few weeks, before starting over fresh with a new character's neighborhood or family or whatever, and build that into a labyrinthine top-heavy mess, starting the cycle over again. (This worked just fine with our RPG group, though, because we never seemed to stick with a game long enough for my burn-outs to have an effect on it.)

I've still got boxes full of notebooks and folders packed full of all this pointless information somewhere that I haven't looked at in about a decade. I can't bear to throw any of it away, but neither can I bring myself to really look at any of it, either.

On a rant: this is because the literature and diagnostic criteria are written by 'experts' who know everything but nothing about the actual experience of ASD. This really makes me cross - scrap the whole DSMIV I say. It only looks like spectrum folk don't have 'imagination' because that imaginative capacity and its products are so different (and yes, better, richer IMHO!! ! ) from boring old NT stuff.

Having said that, I don't have that sort of imagination or creativity (though I do for creating actual real world systems for work etc) although I do have a fantasy life of sorts. I am so impressed with people's descriptions of their fantasy lives. Brilliant detail and creativity. My meagre fantasy life all revolves around actual reality but how I imagine things should happen IF people were fair and honest with each other. In other words, I have that stereotypical AS inability to be other than honest and fair, and naively cannot see hidden motives or read between lines. It trips me up all the time in the real world.