Pyromania?

Post Reply New Topic

Back when I was about 13-14 I was quite a pyromaniac and was obsessed with starting fires. While some small-scale property got damaged there was never any real risk of other people being hurt. Getting seriously hospitalised with facial burns, toxic shock and almost loosing signt in one eye, the urge came to an abrubt stop but I was just wondering is this was common among young aspies (or even adults I suppose)?

You know, I thought this was a thread about the Def Leppard album. My bad.

In college, I lived in a dorm in which eberryone was obsessed with setting things on fire.

I'm not obsessed with setting things on fire, per se, but I am very into bushcraft. Starting fires with flint and steel, stuff like that. I recently got a wood stove for backpacking which I've been playing around with a lot...

Setting things on fire is quite a normal desire, in evolutionary terms it was a necessity.

Granted getting carried away with it can be a problem.

Anyhow Ironically I"m in the midst of going outside at 1 in the morning to start a fire in out in the icy cold canadian wilderness.

I've had to stop playing with fire but I love when I get my chance to shine tending the campfire all night. I keep that thing burning till morning, you can cook over the ashes the next day most of the time. FIRE!!

When I was a kid my parents and I had a lot of campfires in the summer and I remember just being in awe at watching the wood burning and the way the embers glowed and changed shape and color. After a fire I would often draw pictures of flame people chasing after wooden people and setting them ablaze. But I was never really a pyro, I was scared of lighters and even matches. Although I once struck and lit a really big match I found in my parent's room, but I panicked when the flame got maybe four inches long and blew it out as hard as I could. Luckily I have powerful lungs and can blow out a birthday cake with over 20 candles on it!

I used to be quite the pyro when I was younger . It was more purely out of fascination and curiosity than it was about causing destruction/harm. I was always smart about it, taking precautions & having water nearby, but I surely got my self into some situations, though I never hurt my self or another, and never caused property damage...but I did come very close to starting a wild brush fire when I lit off model rocket motors by themselves.


From burning patches of dry grass, to modifying fireworks, to starting fires with a magnifying glass, to launching model rocket motors with no rocket, to lighting random chemicals on fire....pretty sure this is typical among most adolescent boys, but I was just a little more obsessed with it.



I'm still entranced by fire, but my tinkering and experimenting with it has subsided as I've grown older.

I still love poking in fire.

More of an electromaniac, really. I love high-voltage sparks and building ever smaller apparatuses to generate them. Just the smell of the ozone gets me high, and watching that faint blue glow in the dark, corona discharge; magical. Love it.

We had a series of bush fires in Victoria in 2009 - which killed 173 people and thousands of animals. Two of these fires were deliberately started by a man who was said to be autistic - I have to say that my heart sank when they reported his autism on the radio because unfortunately, this is a stigma that will follow others.

I have pyrophobia and I'm especially fearful of pyromaniacs.

I'll sit for hours mesmerised by a flame on a candle or oil lamp, and I love coal fires, bonfires, barbecues etc. but I've never wanted to set anything else on fire. (Apart from cigs, not sure that counts though.)

i am fascinated to watch the object that is burning lose it's structural integrity in such a silky smooth "frame rate" as reality permits.

i like to watch an object lose its potential energy in a steady way, and combustive oxidization is very mesmeric to me because i somehow register and accumulate a quantitative idea of the amount of thermal energy that has been dissipated during the time that i have been watching the structural decay of the burning object, and i can form an indescribable concept of how the 2 states of "flame" and "consumption" (or "structural disintegration") reveal the realities of each other due to their inversely proportional dependencies and effects on each other as the energy is dissipated until nothing remains but ash.

i can watch things that progress very slowly for hours and hours without having my attention interrupted, but i have no maniacal tendencies. i think maniacs must act to bring into their subjective reality, an actual experience of what they are so much obsessed by.

perhaps pyromaniacs have some sort of sexual short circuit that is energized by their creation of societal mayhem. i vaguely remember being told by an off duty policeman (who was at the house of someone who i was also visiting) that the first line of observation in the attendance at a burning property is to visually scrutinize the people who are witnesses, and to make special note of people who may have a hand inside their trousers.

he said that on many occasions, the perpetrators often covertly interfere with themselves as they watch in pretended horror as the property burns.

When I was... maybe 12-14 or so I would love messing around with flammable stuff. I remember failing to make a flamethrower, Making some very nice smoke mixtures, and I made a powder that could make flames taller than me with just a little bit of the powder. Granted I was only about 5-6 when I made that stuff, I'm taller now but you get the idea.