Messed up sense of time?

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I have Aspergers, and it seems like I have a very messed up sense of time. Sometimes, something that happened merely a week ago feels like it happened a year ago, and at other times, things that happened years ago feel like they happened just a few months ago.

Does anyone else have similar issues?

I also have time sense issues, and have heard that others on the spectrum sometimes have time sensory issues, so yes, it is one of the traits we sometimes have. In my case I function both mentally and physically at a slower speed than NTs do. They seem to do things so much faster than I can. They have also noticed this about me, so it's not just a personal impression of my own. One example from childhood, is that when I played board games, I would take too long to figure out my moves. When I played with some cousins of mine, they would get fed up, and start playing past me, making me melt down, because it seemed like they were cheating, when in fact, they were just fed up with my slow pace. Back then Autism spectrum conditions were unknown, so nobody, including me, knew why I was that way. Like you, I also have trouble with events seeming further or nearer in time than they really are, but my slow speed issue is a bigger problem because it puts me out of pace with the rest of the world, and drives the NTs around me crazy, and then they drive me crazy. Unfortunately, there is no cure for my out of whack time sense, as it is part of the mental processing problems associated with Autism spectrum disorders, so even using a watch doesn't help.

While I have no problems with my standard memory I do sometimes get persisting memories from dreams. I will wake up and for the longest time I will remember something and think it really happened. For example a while ago I would remember I had an additional pet and I was looking for it for quite a while. Only later did I realize this happened in a dream and not in reality. My dreams are extremely vivid and I can remember most quite well, which is a blessing and a curse because some dreams can really feed into depression.

In terms of time my circadian rhythm is abnormal, I cannot properly function on a 24 hour day rhythm or I will feel completely exhausted after waking up. So whenever I can I go to sleep 30 - 60 minutes later and wake up 30 - 60 minutes later than the previous day, this is the only way I feel refreshed after sleep. If I try to sleep outside of my natural cycle I feel worse when I wake up than I would if I stayed awake all night.

I think this is because internal time keeping is directly tied to the mechanism that is used for memory storage and retrieval, and that our memory S&R mechanisms are fundamentally different from the norm.

i have terrible problems with my memory and my sleep pattern is all over the place.

I have a few time issues.

I don't track time well when I'm focussed, so I tend to need to set alarms.

My brain seems to take in new ideas slowly. A lot of stuff looks like nonsense to me until I've looked at it a few times and given myself time to ponder over it.

I struggle with this same kind of thing. I have a hard time estimating how long since something has happened...and even sometimes on whether knowing an event that happened in the past happened before or after another event (sort of like messed up order of life events).

I am diagnosed with ADD and so I have attributed some of these time struggles to that. I've come up with a few strategies mostly having to do with setting a lot of reminders and trying to block out time to do activities.

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting to a place where sense of time seems to be intact? This can cause a whole lot of misery because I feel like I am not truly real at times.

I can relate. Things often FEEL like they happened much more recently than they actually did, or vice versa. I've learned to compensate for this by remembering when an event occurred in relation to another event, which I know the approximate date of.

I relate, I have a few different weird things involving sense of time. Many of my memories of my life seem still recent, even ones from forty, fifty years ago. Not absolutely everything of course, I guess just things have meant something to me, have never left my "files" or gone to archive. They have stayed vivid and I can recall them as if they were yesterday. They don't seem in any way "forty years ago" to me. I access them as vividly as something significant from two years ago even though that's probably a more current memory with more active resonance still to my life today.

On the other hand I can't tell you what I had for dinner yesterday. Maybe that's just from getting older, I don't know.

I also have messed up sense of time in terms of losing track of time. I see that one as part of executive functioning problems and poor transition abilities. If I get absorbed in something -- or even just sitting staring at the wall, thinking -- I can lose an hour and not know where it went. When working I manage not to do this but when I'm at home this happens really easily, even while getting ready to go out to work, which is a nightmare for my being punctual. I "lose time" easily by kind of falling down the rabbit hole of my own thoughts.

My house is always dirty. I often have a clear memory of having recently cleaned, but the evidence suggests weeks or months may pass in between cleaning. I will be totally confused and surprised to see a layer of dust on things, until I stop completely and try to recollect when I last did something.

I experience this sort of thing to a degree.

I have similar issues with time. I don't have a sense that things are over and done with from many years past, and people seem surprised that I recall events from 20 years ago as being relatively current. It's hard to explain, but the idea of "closure" that most NT friends seem to have doesn't really click with me. It's like they view past events as belonging to a closed chapter, when I'm still reading the next paragraph. Not sure if that analogy really makes sense but there it is.

I've calculated that I have episodes where time feels 6x slower. They're not constant, but come in episodes of wonky time.

10 minutes feels like an hour. 10 seconds feels like a minute. One hour feels like six. One month feels like six months ago. One year feels like six years. It's not ALWAYS like that (so no, I don't feel like I'm 126 right now) but sometimes it does.

I also have times where I feel like I've lived my whole life and then remember I still have probably ~60 more years and it weirds me out. That feeling like you're done but you've only just begun. Or I'll have memories that feel like they're so distant, that they're not even mine.