Unimaginative?

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IDK I was reading somewhere that a criterion for Aspergers Syndrome is not being so imaginative. Which got me confused because I'm insanely creative and that's all I rely on cause I'm not exceptionally intelligent (but in the top 5). + I don't have much "common sense" nor beauty. -undiagnosed BTW-

What say you!.

When they (that is, NT medical professionals) say "imaginative" or "not imaginative", they refer to social. or shared imagination. That is, doing things like playing house, pretending to be the crew of a pirate ship, role-playing games like cops and robbers, sitting on chairs set up in rows and pretending to be on an airplane, etc. NT kids get a massive kick out of these games, getting to try out different roles that they have years and years of growing up before they get to try them for real, if ever. Aspie kids, on the other hand, don't see the point of those games. Their reactions often are: "but I'm/we're not a real family", "but I'm/we're not a crew of pirates", "but this is not an airplane", and so on. To put it bluntly, they don't want to, or don't care to, delude themselves just to play a game.

As you might have guessed, the creative, solo imagination is not part of the NT-oriented criteria. The fact than an aspie child can dream up a fictitious country in great detail that puts most geography textbooks to shame, is conveniently or deliberately ignored. So, we have a bunch quacks running around, arguing until they're foaming at the mouth, that aspie kids have no imagination. They need to be stripped of their medical licenses and made to work as baggers in a grocery store, at the absolute minimum. Or preferably, be turned into aspies and sent back in time to childhood, so they have to deal with the problems, that we've known since birth, completely unprepared.

Thanks for that info Aspie1.

[Moved from Love and Dating to General Autism Discussion on OP's request]

i have always had an issue with this... in school when we had to write stories i had a really hard time comming up with ideas. my mind would always go blank. playing as a child was just replaying movies and cartoons. now my wife asks me about how things will look.. like i cant picture in my mind what anything will look like unless it is already there. never had good imagination..

I can be creative in devising a solution for a problem, but pure creativity is a problem. "Creative writing" assignments in school were agonizing because I had no idea where to start. When the assignment was to write original poetry, I couldn't, until I summarized in iambic pentameter some of the science fiction novels I'd recently read. That at least got me a passing grade.

I've always had trouble coming up with usernames for websites, email addresses, and other sign-in identifiers if something standard won't work, like first initial + last name. This goes back to the pre-Internet BBS days.

Same with passwords. So I spend half an hour trying to find a username that was unique, made sense to me, and followed all the website's rules for length, spaces, and types f characters; then it wants a password at least 10 characters long, with at least one lower case letter, at least one upper case, at least one number, and at least one "special character." Gah!

Aspie1, that actually clears a lot up for me. I spent a lot of time creating things for myself but rarely interacting with other children when I was younger. I was really confused by that definition since I'm literally surrounded by "imaginative" things I've created.

I get what you say about having a hard time coming with passwords,
titles, ideas, user names. Etc. but because I'm innately creative and I've been producing work since I was five it has become a habit.

And I have found a pattern " shelf it"
by shelving the work u get to re look at it at a later date with new eyes, and fresh ideas can come a flowing without prior hatred and judgment blocking ur perspective.

Also, most importantly "don't overthink" Take my name my notebook was right in front of me.

And actually my reading a lot of books and poetry before I write does give my ideas. I personally don't think anything is wrong with that because I can sort pool ideas from different sources including my own life. I put it together as one. And that's being creative. ...............I think

I was average with being able to have shared imagination with other children as a child. Nobody needed to keep explaining what was happening in the game because I could play with them whilst imagining the same things they were imagining. I was also good with keeping up dramatic play with toys, when on my own or playing with the toys with other children. In fact looking back, I'm quite surprised at myself.

The only games I remember getting upset in are those types like ''duck duck goose'', ''hide and seek'', ''tag'', those sorts of things. That was because I used to get upset if anybody cheated, or if I were ''it'' too many times. I also used to get in a massive rage if I lost any games, as though I felt useless when I did.

But otherwise, I got on well with children. I'm quite odd for an Aspie.

i remember wanting to play with other children at school as a small child, like going up to them and wanting to join in. but i couldnt play along with them. i was happier to just do something like push a toy car or something along without any of my imagination being linked to other childrens imaginations.


but i didnt learn to speak until i was about 9, and i could talk properly by the time i was 11 and so could interact better, but by then i was sent to a special school 3 days a week because they thought i would get severly bullied at mainstream high school and also not recieve the education i needed like i did at primary school.

I can be very creative with the right prompts but struggle a fair amount with imagination.