People telling me to taste color and other impossible things

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I'm having some problems with some things that people keep telling me to do. I told my mother, who told me: 'its an Aspergers thing' (which she's done ever since she became convinced i have 'mild' aspergers and I express anything I don't understand. So I decided I'd come here and see if anyone can explain what it is that I'm supposed to do.

My parents decided it was a good time to send me to a drama course. Its the summer holidays and I've been playing videogames, and they dont seem to understand that I neither feel the need for social contact nor experience enjoyment from it, thus rendering any attempt to make me socialise irrelevant. I decided to go because they wouldnt shut up, and to make sure I can still lie accurately. I've been experiencing difficulties with the instructions that the teachers have been giving me. It seems that drama teachers make much more unreasonable requests than maths and physics teachers do .

My first problem arose when one of the teachers tried to do a 'relaxing' 'visualisation' involving imagining things. And he started talking about making your breath coloured, and blowing across the english channel, which I believe is about 32 km across at it's shortest point. He also started talking about seeing colours fly around you, but I'd given up on the exercise by then. There was also a clock ticking which made it extremely difficult to concentrate on it anyway.

Then today, I got into an argument with another teacher who told me to see sound. I pointed out that its not possible to see sound, and seemingly in an attempt to accuse me of not respecting diversity or people with disabilities (completely unfounded accusations, given her opinions I might accuse her of the same if I could be bothered), she changed the subject and asked me how blind people see colour. I tried to get an answer to my original question, which was about seeing sound, but she told me it was relevant to her original point. So I told her blind people can't see things, meaning they can't see colour. I've also been informed by people who have been blind from birth that they have no concept of colour at all. But she didn't listen to this. She asked me how blind people 'see', so I told her they used their hands. She also told me they taste things, which I suppose is a fair assumption, although I don't think its particularly efficient to taste everything you encounter, particularly as taste doesn't provide as much relevant information about one's surroundings as touch does.
And then she said 'how do you explain to a blind person what green is?'
I said 'If they can't see it, how is it relevant?'
She said 'You get them to taste it'
I pointed out that things with the same colour taste different, but she didn't seem capable of processing that piece of information because she just repeated her earlier point several times and accused me of not respecting diversity. I tried to explain how colour is emitted by atoms and stuff, but she wasn't interested. The argument continued for some time until I said something about the laws of physics. she then said:

'The laws of physics are immense and you can't build a brick wall in space'

which makes no sense at all. Afterwards, I tried to get the others to explain what she was talking about, and the best they came up with was trying to explain the colour blue by getting them to drink the sea. But the sea only reflects the sky, and it doesn't taste of blue, but sea water, and other blue things don't taste of sea water anyway. So then they told me I shouldn't think logically on a drama course and I said I didn't know how to think any other way. They then said something about suspension of disbelief, which doesnt appear to work for me either, hence why I stopped being a christian at age 7...

Can anyone explain this to me?

On the plus side, I told my first sexuals that I'm asexual, and they still like me.

I can taste color and see sounds (specifically music) but that's synesthesia, and not something most people experience.

It has nothing to do with as, it is synesthesia. Mozart had it, and so do I. It helps me compose music.

But everyone else, who were presumably NT, seemed to get it. I know that a number of people here have that, but I'm not one of them. It seems unlikely that many people would have it.

Maybe they were referring to the emotional reaction the human brain usually gets from certain colors? Other than that or synesthesia, I have no idea what they would mean.

Many people don't have it.

Anyway, I took two full years of high school drama and one semester of college drama, and the stuff you described never happened. Thank god. I don't know what was up with your instructors, but it sounded kind of ridiculous to me.

I ran across the same thing in a college drama class and it aggravated me to no end because I took it literally. After class, another student explained it to me. The explanation was this:

The drama teacher is trying to get you to relax your sensory boundaries, to let them blur a little. People without synasthesia do this by thinking in metaphors. I am able to think in metaphors so I did that. You can't experience synasthesia by force of willpower, but if you are able to think in metaphors, you can relax your sensory boundaries a little temporarily.

Good actors need to have permeable boundaries (in all ways, not just between senses). This is what I was told later in the class. Unfortunately for me, I have fairly rigid boundaries. So I came quite close to failing the class and it's just as well because I would be a terrible actor. It makes sense. An actor needs to slip into the persona of a character, which is impossible to do if you are firmly walled up within your own tight boundaries and can only convincingly be yourself. This exercise that you describe attempts to loosen the boundaries of newbie actors, an exercise that can eventually lead to letting in the personas of characters played. I couldn't do it too well. The closest I got in this exercise was thinking in metaphors which was a little way in, but not enough.

Try not to take the acting teacher literally or you will just drive yourself crazy.

In other words, I should stick to physics...

I was getting frustrated at your teacher just reading your post... I can understand your position. Like you, I would not have given up whatsoever in my logical thinking. I would have just kept arguing until something gave in xD i do it a lot. Arguing with my sister is impossible because she doesn't give reasons. She just states her position and won't budge. She will say the same things over and over again.

Anyway, I wouldn't think a drama teacher would be referring to synethesia. Obviously, seeing sound is synethesia, but I think she means the emotions evoked from certain tastes that feel like certain colors. This is a difficult think for an aspie to grasp though, and I can see why it is so frustrating. We're not good at relating emotion to certain things, or really grasping emotion.

Someone tried to explain musical notes to me as being like different colours. I think he was using it as a metaphor, but it didn't help me to be able to differentiate between musical notes.
I would ditch this class . . . sounds like a drag.

I have synesthesia and I doubt that's what she was talking about. It sounds as though she was trying to be poetic and metaphorical but did so really badly and your questions probably annoyed her because they showed how clumsy her "poetic" statements were. If your metaphor just suggests an image that is ridiculous and laughable, it fails. I've heard something about a blind person "tasting colors" somewhere before, although I can't remember where, but it probably sounded less absurd than her secondhand version, although of course it is still not logical.

The fact that she was apparently trying to get you to sort of free-associate but failed to communicate that fact suggests she doesn't even really understand the difference between her mangled metaphors and reality; in other words, she's stupid.

OP, what you are is a very logical, concrete thinker, and you're in a world full of people who are artistic, figurative, and poetic. No wonder you're having trouble communicating with them!

If you can, try to think of these things as poetry. You've studied poetry in school, of course; there's a lot of figurative language, a lot of things that aren't literally true, but bring with them the right connotation.

I don't know if you studied connotation in English class, but here's what it is: Other than the exact meaning of a word, there are other concepts that come along with it. Two words can mean the same thing, but bring different concepts along with them.

For example, the words "House" and "Home" both mean "A place for people to live in." But "House" focuses on the structure itself, and "home" focuses on the way a person identifies his dwelling as secure and familiar. That difference is very significant to people who are very imaginative.

When they ask you to taste a color or see a sound, they are trying to get you to use poetry like that. Instead of tasting "blue" in sea water, they want you to think of the taste of sea water and associate it with the blue of the sea, to think of the connections between concepts. Blue is connected to the ocean, and the ocean is connected to the taste of salt water. Every word and concept has connections to every other word and concept; and even when two words mean the same thing, they are often connected to different things.

You might never really get the hang of it, because you are such a concrete thinker, but it might be a good idea for you to observe the behavior of the people you've found yourself interacting with, in order to try to understand them better. Perhaps you can find patterns in the way they think and do things.