Postcards From My Mind: Perspectives of Asperger's Syndrome

(8) Time

Probably due to the way my brain processes information and my memory system, I have considerable difficulty understanding the concept of time. As an early adolescent I became obsessed with quantum physics and Irwin Shrodinger probably as a way to intellectualize what I didn’t innately understand.

Until last year, I intellectually understood the concept of cyclical (such as seasons, night/day, birth/death, etc.), but didn’t “get it” from a core perspective. Interestingly, I started this executive functioning journey about 5 years ago, which is approximately the time developmentally that it takes children to start to understand concepts such as time, seasons, calendar, etc. I’ve actually noticed this parallel quite a bit as I’ve evolved (the time it takes me to learn certain concepts appears to parallel typical development. I will discuss this further in the section on Bateson Therapy).

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External concepts are easy to compensate for. There are watches for time, calendars for dates, and, in New England, the outside paints a picture of which season it is. Internally, comprehending time is a much more difficult thing because there are no contextual cues to create compensatory strategies for.

The worst of the worst is dreaming and watching TV. It’s very hard for me to distinguish reality from what I’ve dreamt and observed on TV. When I observe TV or dream something, the feelings I experience are indistinguishable from my “real” life. Right now the war in Afghanistan is occurring. At night sometimes I incorporate the news into my dreams (as I’m sure many people do). When I wake I have difficulty transitioning from my dreaming life to my waking life. They both feel the same, so I need to physically separate them.

As a child, TV posed a difficult problem. I didn’t understand that what I was watching wasn’t real. Horror movies were incorporated into my repertoire of thoughts and I was not able to distinguish day from night. I remember one particular incident, where I observed paratroopers jumping from a plane and landing in by a field with a house and shooting semi-automatic weapons through the glass killing all the people inside. For ten years after that scene I was afraid to sit by the bay window in the room that I watched the movie in. When looking at that TV set I instantly remembered the movie and thought the people were outside.

 

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