Normally my dreams are bizarre, nonsensical mashups of illogical plotlines, coupled with acutely detailed observations. My latest, however, may give some actual insight to better understanding people with autism; or at least, some empathy.
Many autistic people are highly sensitive to all kinds of sensory input, and often cannot prioritize among them, or be able to respond or communicate in ways non-autistic people comprehend or deem appropriate. Many are also intellectually gifted, but ill-equipped to interact with an alternately-oriented world.
My dream visually depicted their outward communication as a load of transparent cylinders crammed with parcels of concepts. Each package was a discrete, labeled thought, wrapped in a different color of cellophane.
I have no image of that dream scene to share, so I will try to describe it as well as I can.
There were several of these cylinders of various sizes and diameters in my view. I understood that the concepts inside had first been compressed into separate thought packages, and then further compacted together to fill each capped and sealed cylinder. They were varying sizes and shapes, like paper-wrapped cuts of meat; and like various sizes of gravel, they filled all the spaces within the cylinder. I was able to read two of them. One larger, pork chop-shaped gray package contained the observation that the individual hairs on the back of a person’s head had gray tips, much like the silver guard hairs on a wolf’s fur. A small red round one counted the ticks of a wristwatch on someone else’s arm in the room. These bundles were stuffed inside the cylinders with all the other encrypted thoughts and impressions, without any order, category, or priority.
The cylinders, then, were the delivery mechanism of self-articulated thoughts and stimuli responses to an outside world. They included no instructions for unpacking, decoding or deciphering the contents.
I have no way of knowing if this visual depiction in any way represents the actualities of an autistic mind and response system. Like many of my dreams, it could be the result of random firings of neurons in my own brain representing sheer nonsense. But it does give me empathy for those who are neurodivergent, and their challenges to communicating with those of us who aren’t.