Question about the connection between Autism and fantasies

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervasive ... prov=sfla1


I have a very good question.

I saw that Wikipedia included Preoccupation with fantasy, such as imaginary friends in childhood as a symptom of PDD-NOS (Atypical Autism).

What does wikipedia actually mean by that?

It's not being specific when fantasies becomes a problem.

When the interest in fantasy becomes maladaptive.

Like me.

I have related symptom as well.

Well I have PDD NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified...So not quite autism. But well having any developmental disorder seems to make concerned parties think you cannot do your own relationship. I mean for sure I have a ltr and I want to stay in that...I Love my boyfriend and regardless of what others see i want to be there for him....I don't care he is the one I committed to so he is the one I am there for no matter how he comes to look or whatever he is what I committed to so I cannot throw that away. You don't commit to someone and then just throw them out when they start looking worse. I mean I want me and my boyfriend to live as long as possible whilst we still have our brains intact and are together....ha ha if it means we gotta get all freaky in sex so be it, I hear couples who have more sex lasting into older ages live longer...and we are all about living as long as we can.

I played a lot with imaginary friends and in imaginative worlds as a child and I did it until I was much older than most NT kids. In fact I still make up imaginative worlds and stories in my head. Though my trauma therapist thinks that it was a way for me to cope with/escape from trauma, but I've always wondered if there was a little more to it than that.

I think it's important to note that something can be a trait or indicative of a condition without it being problematic or maladaptive. For instance I used to be really into collecting business cards. (I still have my collection, but I'm just not nearly as active in seeking them out as I used to be.) In the report from my neuropsych evaluation when I was diagnosed with Aspergers the psychologist specifically noted that I had asked for a business card from everyone in the office and that I had explained that I had a collection of over 400 business cards. She included this in her report because it shows that I have intense special interests that are unusual which is a characteristic of Aspergers. But my collection was just out of the ordinary, not problematic or maladaptive. In fact it could be argued that it was helpful because I interacted with more people.

My abnormal psych professor explained that there is a difference between a behavior or trait being out of the ordinary and it being maladaptive. The two sort of lie on the opposite ends of a continuum and the point where something goes from different to problematic can be murky.

That being said, I could perhaps see how an extreme preoccupation with imaginary friends or an imaginary world can become a problem if the person hardly even interacted with other people because of it or became distracted so they miss important information from their environment. But again, just because someone does something more than what is ordinarily seen, doesn't automatically make it maladaptive or problematic.

Franz, when you were growing up I can’t help but wonder if you had any brothers or sisters. I had a much older sister who helped me ALOT. She didn’t stop me from being mute or having a very rich inner universe, but I didn’t ever want an imaginary friend.

I always mixed fantasy with reality starting from my early childhood and it went all the way to adulthood.

I still mix fantasy with reality.

Mixing fantasy with reality can be a coping mechanism. Can you recognize when or if it becomes problematic to you?

I tend to mix fantasy with reality when I have hard time communicating with others.

I am not sure if that means coping, because I was born with it.

A hard time communicating with others means you are under duress when communicating. This would suggest that it is a way of coping. You may well have been “differently wired” from birth, but it’s your interaction with the world itself that may well be the cause of your retreating into this fantasy world.

I restrict my interactions with the outside world as much as possible now, and I was once very involved and successful in society, though at a cost to my mental health. I much prefer to be on my own mostly. That’s not to say that I don’t let certain people get close, but I have to really bond with them.

Thank you! I understood.

It makes sense. In this context I was coping with the world that was not build for me, because I am different.

Absolutely! It’s called “self preservation” .

Thank you!

I also had an imaginary friend and played a lot of imaginary role playing games.
I still live inside my head with fictional characters up to this day.

I live in my head too. As a child I created imaginary paracosms with imaginary characters. Sometimes I wrote them in stories but most of the time I just lived the thoughts in my mind. I didn't talk out loud to invisible people, and I knew it wasn't real, but in my head I was always dissociating a bit through the fantasy of being another person, in another life. I was married to Elton John (in my head) until I was about 13. It gave me something to think about when I was school or doing other boring tasks. Then I divorced Elton and married OZZY Osbourne. That was a lot more fun (lol) - and allowed me to grow up a little bit with that taste in music. My dream worlds primarily ended when I started dating at age 17, but one came back when I was going through my divorce in the 90s. I think it was a comfort behaviour to help me detach emotionally from the stress I was experiencing at that time.

When I was a kid I daydreamed a lot, and I still do.

If I'm not playing games or doing something else that distracts me/takes all my attention, I often just sit there daydreaming and thinking about ideas for things. I have a lot of ideas for video games and cartoons/comics that I haven't done much with, since I daydream so much that trying to think about those things and put them to fruition just makes me daydream more. lol

For me it has become a coping mechanism, but it probably was originally just me having a very active imagination. I noticed it became an issue around the time I started dissociating/derealizing a lot, due to the fact I can't do much when that happens besides for just think about things.