Autistic People Don't Daydream?

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I daydream all the time.

I'm pretty sure that I have spent at least half my time awake daydreaming. And I have had more analytical and meaningful thoughts while daydreaming than doing any other activity.

I'd have thought auties daydreamed much more than NTs really. Or else we wouldn't be described as "in our own world".

I am NT. My most common daydream is a "what if?" where I wonder what the world I am experiencing would seem like to a person from the past. Sometimes it's 100 or 200 years. Sometimes 1000 or 20,000. I look around at my surroundings and wonder how they would be interpreted by these tme traveling people of different eras. This is endlessly entertaining and can keep my mind occupied during such dull times as standing in a long line or waiting for a bus. What would the person from 500 years ago think about the clothes of the other people in line? What would the person from 20,000 years ago think about the cars driving past the bus stop?

But if you stuck me in a scanner and told me to alternate between doing some task and looking at a symbol, I doubt I would start day dreaming my standard go-to daydream (although I might, it's become such a habit). So what would the scanner read as?

They definately found a meaningful difference between brain scans of those with an autism diagnosis and those without. But it doesn't necessarily mean what they assume it means.

I do daydream, but I cannot tell if my daydreaming is the same daydreaming that non-autistic people have and if my daydreaming is using other brain-pathways than daydreaming of non-autistic people does.
I know my daydreaming, but not the daydreaming of other people.
My daydreaming is repetitive from early age on and I always need to see the details in my mind again and again and again and have to repeat the scenes again and again and again.
Then I have the dissolving into pattern-thing where I just get "caught" into the pattern of a wallpaper or a shade of light and I get "catatonic" sometimes for a long time, my mind gets blank.
Then I have music in my head repeating as well and I am in this "catatonic-dream-state".

If I'm not daydreaming, then I don't know what I'm doing.

Funny, I was just wondering the other day whether I daydream. I feel like most of the time I analyze, or picture future conversations or tasks, or sometimes I will repeat a word or phrase over and over in my mind, actually hearing it in my head and seeing it as if it were written. But I don't daydream of anything like being on a beach, etc.

Ironically, one of my analyitical daydreams from a year or so ago sittin on the bus went along the lines of "How can one know the way they percieve reality is not totally different from the way others percieve the world?" I have always felt a difference and a disconnect from most people so I guess this is a natural thing for me to ponder. Funnily enough I started mentally planning similar experiments so the one described in this thread although I believe I eventually decided that it would be as difficult as prooving that I see the colour red the same as another person - I.e. far too subjective to easily proove.

I am always thinking about things or daydreaming and I think about and daydream the same things over and over. I have the same conversations in my head or analyse the same situations over and over. I don't really decide what I am going to think about or daydream or when. My mind just goes where it wants to go.

I remember back in high school thinking I was like the noble gases.

I daydream constantly.

Hah!

Autistic people don't daydream. Whatever.
These people don't know what they're talking about.

I daydream. I actively create them and imagine them and act them out and absorb myself in my daydreams.

Oh, guess what? Autistic people have IMAGINATIONS too!

Who would have thought???

There was a different study on what NTs thought about while daydreaming in the MRI machine, this time reporting what they had thought about after the imaging. People mostly thought about what they going to do with their day, week, month. The dry cleaning that they had to pick up later that day. The party that they were going to that weekend.

It was all just a beautiful daydream.

Those are sad daydreams.

My daydreams usually involve my fantasy world and my fantasy self.