Lack of Imagination

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You're right, TheHouseholdCat - I usually have a problem with the plot; That's why my stories never have a plot, though.

I haven't written much in the last three to four years. I keep thinking about doing some writing, but it usually upsets me too much. I am happy to make up scenes in my head without having to write them down.

Bun, I've always thought I didn't have much of an imagination. I'm an amateur artist and I have to work from photos, or nothing happens. I don't copy the photo, the colours are not even close to it (I like the surreal look), but I need it as a starting point. But, your read my little kids 'story. I've no idea where that came from and I've never written fiction before. I was lying in my bed and thought of it. I actually worked backwards. It wasn't wonderful and I'm definitely not a fiction writer, but I proved to myself that I do have an imagination. BTW I'm not PDA like my daughter probably is. I fit the Aspergers diagnosis more closely, minus some traits and with some ADHD-inattentive traits (minus a diagnosis too). I'm a mystery, even to myself.

I see.

Ok, I looked into PDA a bit and found nothing on imagination, only that, as you said, it's like autism, only with more defiance and mood swings and less social difficulties. Maybe those with AS are often as imaginative as those with PDA, but the differences in social problems make it easier for those with PDA to express them. I dunno.

The second last paragraph here mentions imagination. This website is the best resource I've been able to find on PDA.
http://www.pdacontact.org.uk/noframes/p ... sons.shtml

Ok, thanks. Three things to note:

1. So what is imagination referring to?
2. The diagnosis trends between the two are obviously different (autism is a lot more well known and has a huge bias towards males), and I'm sure in a lot of cases the diagnosis depends on who you see.
3. Is it just me or does there description of AS sound relatively severe?

They seem to refer to pretend play. I may be asperger, (In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.) but pretend play was not a problem for me; It was one of the only things that I was doing with other childrens as play activity.

I told my shrink about my imagination and my pretend play as a child. He said that lacking imagination is not a criteria for AS. Attwood claims people with AS can be highly imaginitive, as does some research done on women and girls.

Oh, and I definately do not fit the description of PDA.

English was one of my worst subjects in school because I hated writing stories. I know for a fact that my problem was a lack of imagination because I was a history major in college and I had no problems writing fifteen page papers for my history classes but when it comes to making up stories I always have terrible cases of writers block. I hate trying to use my imagination because it is always in vein.

Yes, I really think this imagination thing is a bit of a red herring, when it comes to diagnosing AS. Some docs (and the psych we saw) think it's relevant, but wiser docs think not. This outdated notion may cause my daughter to get a diagnosis of PDD-NOS. However, she fits the description of PDA better than AS (even if we take imagination out of the picture altogether).

History requires a great deal of imagination, too. I know I used to be ok in History classes until year 12. I could not really understand or imagine what we were discussing between year 7 and year 10. I know we must have done something in those 4 years, but I simply cannot remember what. I can tell you exactly what we did in year 12 and year 13 though. Suddenly I could imagine what we were talking about, just the way I could imagine in History classes in primary school.

Politics, on the other hand, was a subject I dreaded in my final two years. We had to do so much in so little time and I couldn't see why that was necessary. I could never get into the things we talked about. Migration was the only part of Politics that I could actually understand because it was less abstract.

I actually believe the reason why we are made to believe we cannot imagine certain things lies in the way it is taught in school. You'll always find it harder to imagine certain things. But this shouldn't mean we can never imagine them.


Yeah, it does seem quite outdated. ^^

It is possible to pretend without imagination. Re-enacting what you've seen, heard or read isn't very imaginative. This is the difference in pretend play, expect the aspie to remind the other child of their lines if they deviate from the script..

A good doc would recognise its very hard for a parent to tell the difference

Jason

Jason

I've never done that (scripted pretend play) simply because I want to do stuff that I created and envisioned, not what someone else made up. If anything I say this isn't a sign of a lack of imagination, it's just stubbornness/rigiding and avoiding wrongness. Not changing a script that someone else created OR they created is avoiding wrongness because the script was meant to be performed a certain way.

I did not do any pretend play as a child, nor did I play with other children at all. I never did these things in my life. By the time that I was old enough to interact with peers, the stage of playing with toys or pretend playing had passed for everyone. I played with objects by ordering, arranging, and building, and my only toys were blocks and moar blocks. I did not show the slightest interest in other toys. My mother told me that she thought that I was a highly imaginative child, because I built interesting complicated arrangements of blocks and objects all over the floor and drew unconventional pictures of bizarro transportation devices whizzing through bizarro landscapes. I did not incorporate anything social into my play, and I played completely silently, no babbling or talking to myself or about anything. I do not recall making up any stories in my mind, and even if I had, there would have been no way for others to know, because I would not have been able to tell them in words. I did not have any fantasy worlds in my mind, eggsept when drawing, when I would create strange scenes, but many of my drawings were of real objects, like all different kinds of airplanes. The jellyfish hovercraft and pencil centipede water skis only showed up every once in awhile. It is only within the past couple of years that I have been making up stories in my mind, writing them down, and sharing them with people. I had some stories as videos and experiences in my mind, and I finally figured out how to externalize them in words as an adult. I do not have writer's block, because writing more of a story is just going back to the video to resume playing it. I am good at coming up with my own stories to write, but I am not good at analyzing the stories of others. I can't come up with hidden intentions of characters or complicated feelings of characters when analyzing fiction, but I have no problem coming up with them to put into my own fiction. So if I am supposed to talk about a story or social events or people interacting, I still appear to have no imagination as an adult.

That still has little to do with me.