Is there a name for the imaginary internal worlds we tend to retreat into?

[Nervous Rex]

I understand it’s common for Autistic people to have rich, detailed worlds in their minds.

Is there an official or formal name for them?

My wife was describing a student of hers who has a lot of spectrumy behaviors, and lives in their own fantasy world. I’ve know for a decades that I can go off all too easily into flights of fancy and that I have to take deliberate steps to stay grounded in reality. I’m wondering if this is a common enough phenomenon to have a name.

 

[Thinx]

Middle Earth? Think Tolkien used to do this.

 

[Gerontius]

Daydreaming?

 

[Booknerd515]

I tend to refer to mine as coping mechanisms since they help me get through things and I'm rather particular on telling others about them since they're private. I don't really daydream since I have difficulty visualizing a place I've never been to so doctors just think I have imaginative thinking.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

A private world is a beautiful escape. As aspies, I think we all have one. Mine is somewhere tied between the desert of my youth and the black volcanic soil of the Columbia River Basin. Where memories are like silk in the breeze, and sometimes I catch them, and sometimes they swirl around me, and sometimes I chase them, but I can't quite grasp the tails.

Also flying its banners are the places I've visited or lived briefly, and the places I've dreamed of. There are faces reflected in puddles on the ground, I recognize their eyes in the leaves of the trees. And I know their touch as I move through the grass.

My world is a place that I wish I could invite others to, but it is the loneliest of all, because even though everyone seems to be there, I am the only one.

 

[SDRSpark]

Wait so this is an autism thing too? Dang...lol.

I'm a chronic daydreamer. Pretty much every waking moment I have something going on in my head. I can pretty much live in two worlds simultaneously (depending on what is going on in the real world, sometimes they overlap).

This would probably be considered dysfunctional, but because of it, my visualization and visual-spatial skills are off the charts good, which is actually a great career skill.

(and people think we don't have imaginations. pffft!)

 

[tree]

Exploring the Inner Worlds of Autistic Minds

"Approximately 90% of Autistic people had inner worlds or internal conversations as something in common with each other, but the way this manifested was vastly different."

Some of “other” reasons from the question above were really interesting.

There was providing a counterpoint to keep things fair:

I talk to my inner self about everything. He helps me. We don’t see things the same way, but through ongoing dialogue about everything that matters, we draw conclusions that I act on.

To reduce the stress of being emotionally or circumstantially unprepared:

I mostly use inner conversations as a means to re-visit or to plan ahead for conversations. Currently doing a lot of pretend confrontations with my family as such is on the horizon and it’s stressing me. It acts as practice and clarification of my own thoughts. Similar thing for roleplaying. Going into character and having made up conversations with other people in universe such that I may practice the role and expand the thoughts, values, vocabulary and mannerisms of the character. To summarize I suppose that I host internal conversations to alleviate the stress that comes with being unprepared.

Several people noted that it was the only place where they were seen, heard, appreciated, understood, and included.

It’s a place where I know I will not be judged or perceived as “weird” by others.

For others, it is a more systematized way of understanding and processing feelings:

To me, it has also being a very important way of learning about my feelings, since sometimes I can’t recognize or understand them in me in the outside, but sometimes I can if I experiment them in a different world, from a different perspective.

Many people mentioning that it was the only place where they were free to express themselves and to be their authentic selves."

Spoiler

We asked Autistic people if they wanted to use a pen name, their real name, or remain anonymous. We’ve honored those preferences below:

from Emma Wood

Various fictional worlds (from tv shows, anime, books, movies, etc.) that I have loved, where I can interact with my favorite characters in any way I want. I also have worlds either inspired by works of fiction or made up whole cloth from my imagination, where I can go on adventures and interact with people I have created.

ER

Fun! Full of funny conversations and happy events! Feels like I’m living in my own film. Rules change if/when I want them to. I pace at the same time and regard both my imagined worlds and the pacing as stims.

Anonymous

I look internally for thoughts and feelings while shutting out the external world completely. My external interactions run on autopilot. I can’t remember them after. I focus on whatever paths my internal thoughts and feelings take me. I leave myself open to go anywhere, but it is usually to one of the things I am particularly interested in. In this state I get insights and make linkages from one topic to
another. I find having more than one completely different topic running at once creates serendipity and insight due to cross linkages and viewing one issue from the standpoint of the other. You can learn a huge amount this way.

Rose

As a child, it was an elaborate unicorn homeland full of frolicking unicorns and waterfalls. I could sit and stare at the wall for hours and never get bored. As I teen, I learned how to lucid dream. There, I learned how to fly. Eventually I learned to create whole worlds.

As an adult there are many times and reasons I go to my inner world, and many worlds to choose from, though I don’t spend hours on end there. I just slip in and out as needed. I’ll describe a few.

For safety, as a city person and woman who keeps odd hours and likes to travel alone, when I’m walking down the street I imagine scenarios in which I must act quickly to defend myself. I try to think of every variable. I rehearse until it’s deeply ingrained. It’s a purely mental exercise yet my muscles develop memory. I don’t know how that works, but it has been tested. So I’m always ready,
even when I’m lost in more silly daydreams.

If I’m stuck in an insufferable conversation I cannot escape from, particularly topics of ignorance and politics, I’ve trained my face to smile and nod, while my mind escapes to a hidden zen garden. Each time I go there I add new features—rocks, water, foliage, maybe a cute amphibian.

I often imagine conversations that I know will occur or are likely to occur, so I can be prepared.
I often talk to myself as well, to reason through a problem or explore an idea from different angles.

-S

My inner world is as vast as the universe itself. I’m never bored visiting it, and always wish I could stay longer than “real time” allows. My inner world is colorful and diverse, full of images, language and music that bring me joy or take me deeper into the understanding of my self and others.

I dream all of the dreams, think all of the thoughts, and experience all of life’s events from every angle possible; like a bird flitting from perch to perch. Lock me up and I will still sing, think, create and remain free. For some people being left alone with their own mind is torturous and terrifying. But for me, it’s an invitation to leisurely float through my artfully-crafted galaxy of wonder and knowledge.

Anonymous

My inner world is basically a futuristic, cyberpunk-esque metropolis in which my imaginary friends and I all live. I experience it kind of like one would an AR game ; it’s like an enhanced, augmented version of my current life, with more neon lights, more activities and stimuli, and people who actually want to be my friends and do things with me and with whom it’s easy to communicate.

Anonymous

Its a shifting world, various concepts, people, locations etc. get added in some get thrown out, as I grow and learn. The world is vaguely similar to earth, but with high fantasy, and scifi mixed in. My inner world started as a way to relieve boredom, stress and loneliness, but has now shifted to help me practice interactions and learn from my social interactions through the day.

Atlantis

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always took refuge on my inner worlds, and it had a lot to do with my special interests from the moment, sometimes. Like, I remember being three/four and having power rangers as my first autistic special interest, and since I couldn’t watch it all the time and kids my age (or any age) weren’t obsessed with it like me, I created my own power rangers dimension in my head and would stay there all the time to hide and calm myself or just play. And then it became an habit, and I would make
many inner worlds, some from books, series or movies, others from my own mind. I have two invented inner worlds, one with fairies, witches, wargs, kings and pirates in their different and mostly beautiful places, and the other one has “yanos”, some magical creatures connected to nature who live in a world divided in different types of forests and castles built within giant trees and at the top of a climb,
stuff like that.

Anonymous

Often it’s kind of like a really long simulation of real life where I play out imaginary scenarios or redo scenarios I actually experienced and play out different variations of how I would react and/or how other people might react to me. Sometimes I have whole conversations, either with people I actually know or imaginary people.

Kahukura

It’s where a lot of my life happens, where I process things, have discussions, work things out. People around me are experiencing approx 5% of what’s actually going on inside my mind. Maybe up to a maximum of 10%. That percentage is smaller depending on how safe and comfortable I am."

There are many more responses, in the original article, but won't all fit in a single reply to this thread.

"The layered and detailed nature of this internal world-building allows for Autistic people to exist in parallel with the world that should be and the one that is, and perhaps to find a way to bridge the two."

 

[UberScout]

Mine is The Oasis, a dome-shaped beach with a large indent of water surrounded by sand which looks more and more like diamonds the closer you get to the water. At the bottom there is a wide, open patch of ocean floor people can sit or lay on while they wait for Aloe to visit them.

 

[James45]

Only recently diagnosed but always had to ability to play with the scale of things, it is very easy for me to turn a stone wall into a cliff face, or walk along a yellow line along the road and have thousand foot drops to either side of me and also I can put myself into the landscape in maps. It is not an intrusive thing, I can play with it when I want.

Spent a long time as a child looking at maps and travelling through them. I never thought this was a autistic trait, but guess it probably is!?

It is a kind of internal/external reality mix up...does anybody have anything similar to this?

 

[Skittlebisquit]

Exploring the Inner Worlds of Autistic Minds

"Approximately 90% of Autistic people had inner worlds or internal conversations as something in common with each other, but the way this manifested was vastly different."
View attachment 69976

Some of “other” reasons from the question above were really interesting.

There was providing a counterpoint to keep things fair:

I talk to my inner self about everything. He helps me. We don’t see things the same way, but through ongoing dialogue about everything that matters, we draw conclusions that I act on.

To reduce the stress of being emotionally or circumstantially unprepared:

I mostly use inner conversations as a means to re-visit or to plan ahead for conversations. Currently doing a lot of pretend confrontations with my family as such is on the horizon and it’s stressing me. It acts as practice and clarification of my own thoughts. Similar thing for roleplaying. Going into character and having made up conversations with other people in universe such that I may practice the role and expand the thoughts, values, vocabulary and mannerisms of the character. To summarize I suppose that I host internal conversations to alleviate the stress that comes with being unprepared.

Several people noted that it was the only place where they were seen, heard, appreciated, understood, and included.

It’s a place where I know I will not be judged or perceived as “weird” by others.

For others, it is a more systematized way of understanding and processing feelings:

To me, it has also being a very important way of learning about my feelings, since sometimes I can’t recognize or understand them in me in the outside, but sometimes I can if I experiment them in a different world, from a different perspective.

Many people mentioning that it was the only place where they were free to express themselves and to be their authentic selves."

Spoiler

We asked Autistic people if they wanted to use a pen name, their real name, or remain anonymous. We’ve honored those preferences below:

from Emma Wood

Various fictional worlds (from tv shows, anime, books, movies, etc.) that I have loved, where I can interact with my favorite characters in any way I want. I also have worlds either inspired by works of fiction or made up whole cloth from my imagination, where I can go on adventures and interact with people I have created.

ER

Fun! Full of funny conversations and happy events! Feels like I’m living in my own film. Rules change if/when I want them to. I pace at the same time and regard both my imagined worlds and the pacing as stims.

Anonymous

I look internally for thoughts and feelings while shutting out the external world completely. My external interactions run on autopilot. I can’t remember them after. I focus on whatever paths my internal thoughts and feelings take me. I leave myself open to go anywhere, but it is usually to one of the things I am particularly interested in. In this state I get insights and make linkages from one topic to
another. I find having more than one completely different topic running at once creates serendipity and insight due to cross linkages and viewing one issue from the standpoint of the other. You can learn a huge amount this way.

Rose

As a child, it was an elaborate unicorn homeland full of frolicking unicorns and waterfalls. I could sit and stare at the wall for hours and never get bored. As I teen, I learned how to lucid dream. There, I learned how to fly. Eventually I learned to create whole worlds.

As an adult there are many times and reasons I go to my inner world, and many worlds to choose from, though I don’t spend hours on end there. I just slip in and out as needed. I’ll describe a few.

For safety, as a city person and woman who keeps odd hours and likes to travel alone, when I’m walking down the street I imagine scenarios in which I must act quickly to defend myself. I try to think of every variable. I rehearse until it’s deeply ingrained. It’s a purely mental exercise yet my muscles develop memory. I don’t know how that works, but it has been tested. So I’m always ready,
even when I’m lost in more silly daydreams.

If I’m stuck in an insufferable conversation I cannot escape from, particularly topics of ignorance and politics, I’ve trained my face to smile and nod, while my mind escapes to a hidden zen garden. Each time I go there I add new features—rocks, water, foliage, maybe a cute amphibian.

I often imagine conversations that I know will occur or are likely to occur, so I can be prepared.
I often talk to myself as well, to reason through a problem or explore an idea from different angles.

-S

My inner world is as vast as the universe itself. I’m never bored visiting it, and always wish I could stay longer than “real time” allows. My inner world is colorful and diverse, full of images, language and music that bring me joy or take me deeper into the understanding of my self and others.

I dream all of the dreams, think all of the thoughts, and experience all of life’s events from every angle possible; like a bird flitting from perch to perch. Lock me up and I will still sing, think, create and remain free. For some people being left alone with their own mind is torturous and terrifying. But for me, it’s an invitation to leisurely float through my artfully-crafted galaxy of wonder and knowledge.

Anonymous

My inner world is basically a futuristic, cyberpunk-esque metropolis in which my imaginary friends and I all live. I experience it kind of like one would an AR game ; it’s like an enhanced, augmented version of my current life, with more neon lights, more activities and stimuli, and people who actually want to be my friends and do things with me and with whom it’s easy to communicate.

Anonymous

Its a shifting world, various concepts, people, locations etc. get added in some get thrown out, as I grow and learn. The world is vaguely similar to earth, but with high fantasy, and scifi mixed in. My inner world started as a way to relieve boredom, stress and loneliness, but has now shifted to help me practice interactions and learn from my social interactions through the day.

Atlantis

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always took refuge on my inner worlds, and it had a lot to do with my special interests from the moment, sometimes. Like, I remember being three/four and having power rangers as my first autistic special interest, and since I couldn’t watch it all the time and kids my age (or any age) weren’t obsessed with it like me, I created my own power rangers dimension in my head and would stay there all the time to hide and calm myself or just play. And then it became an habit, and I would make
many inner worlds, some from books, series or movies, others from my own mind. I have two invented inner worlds, one with fairies, witches, wargs, kings and pirates in their different and mostly beautiful places, and the other one has “yanos”, some magical creatures connected to nature who live in a world divided in different types of forests and castles built within giant trees and at the top of a climb,
stuff like that.

Anonymous

Often it’s kind of like a really long simulation of real life where I play out imaginary scenarios or redo scenarios I actually experienced and play out different variations of how I would react and/or how other people might react to me. Sometimes I have whole conversations, either with people I actually know or imaginary people.

Kahukura

It’s where a lot of my life happens, where I process things, have discussions, work things out. People around me are experiencing approx 5% of what’s actually going on inside my mind. Maybe up to a maximum of 10%. That percentage is smaller depending on how safe and comfortable I am."

There are many more responses, in the original article, but won't all fit in a single reply to this thread.

"The layered and detailed nature of this internal world-building allows for Autistic people to exist in parallel with the world that should be and the one that is, and perhaps to find a way to bridge the two."

Thank you for sharing about this

 

[Skittlebisquit]

Only recently diagnosed but always had to ability to play with the scale of things, it is very easy for me to turn a stone wall into a cliff face, or walk along a yellow line along the road and have thousand foot drops to either side of me and also I can put myself into the landscape in maps. It is not an intrusive thing, I can play with it when I want.

Spent a long time as a child looking at maps and travelling through them. I never thought this was a autistic trait, but guess it probably is!?

It is a kind of internal/external reality mix up...does anybody have anything similar to this?

I think alot of us do. I know Ive read about something similar here before.

 

[SDRSpark]

Exploring the Inner Worlds of Autistic Minds

"Approximately 90% of Autistic people had inner worlds or internal conversations as something in common with each other, but the way this manifested was vastly different."
View attachment 69976

Wow!!! Most of this. And yet for the longest time I believed that I was delusional (and encouraged to continue believing that by professionals...GAH!!!...frustrated).

 

[Suzette]

Daydreaming that interrupts or prevents one from functioning in the real world is cslled "maladaptive daydreaming". You can read about the condition here.
Maladaptive Daydreaming: Scale, Symptoms, and Treatments

As @tree 's post noted, there are many reasons auties day dream. For most of us daydreaming is a positive coping strategy.

 

[UberScout]

As @tree 's post noted, there are many reasons auties day dream. For most of us daydreaming is a positive coping strategy.

This is actually something my therapist and I talked about, it's the whole reason Aloe even exists; she's like an imaginary friend that tends to appear to you in other ways besides just your imagination.

Not quite up there with an entity that watches over you making sure you're safe, but rather what could be best described as a living protection device, in one sense.

 

[Sherlock77]

Many years ago I created an imaginary character, a character more grounded in reality than fantasy, I even wrote down details about aspects of this imaginary person...

In recent years I haven't thought about it as much, this "person" only pops into my head occasionally now

 

[Wulven]

Yeah. I have a place like that. My friend actually helped me see it. A grassy field under blue skies with soft white clouds floating overhead. First saw it while swinging on a swing set. Then added a forest with a small creek running threw it and grass covered hills. There's a big mountain behind the forest. It's also filled with peaceful wolf people. My extended family. It's a place I will someday see in person. With my friends.

On my recent reevaluate. I got a one in creativity and I know why. The person gave me a book with frogs floating threw the air on Lily pads. I knew the answers he was looking for me to give by showing me that book. But, at that moment I was a scientific realist. More inclined towards natural rather then fantasy explanations. So not very creative. Course he was new and I the first test for real world application of his college studies. Of which he owed a great deal for. I

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

Only recently diagnosed but always had to ability to play with the scale of things, it is very easy for me to turn a stone wall into a cliff face, or walk along a yellow line along the road and have thousand foot drops to either side of me and also I can put myself into the landscape in maps. It is not an intrusive thing, I can play with it when I want.

Spent a long time as a child looking at maps and travelling through them. I never thought this was a autistic trait, but guess it probably is!?

It is a kind of internal/external reality mix up...does anybody have anything similar to this?

I can still spend hours just tracing my finger along maps, especially old ones. And I too can see a canyon in a small boulder. I guess it's an aspie thing.

 

[Judge]

I’ve know for a decades that I can go off all too easily into flights of fancy and that I have to take deliberate steps to stay grounded in reality. I’m wondering if this is a common enough phenomenon to have a name.

Sure. It's got a name alright.

Though it's something connected with pop culture and not medicine or autism.

- "Walter Mitty"

Walter Mitty - Wikipedia

 

[James45]

I can still spend hours just tracing my finger along maps, especially old ones. And I too can see a canyon in a small boulder. I guess it's an aspie thing.

That's really amazing to know! It is probably my favourite part of who I am, but thought it was just me.

 

[musicalman]

Interesting topic!

Most of my internal world consists of friends who know how I work and think. They give me a safe space to explore my thoughts, feelings, scripts, desires and the like. When I talk to them, I feel like I am talking to my best friends who can sense more than anyone else. We don't always agree, but we do understand, which is something I feel I dont' get from a lot of real people.

There are times though where I feel like I indulge internal stuff a little too much. I know very real things need to get done every day, and I try to do them. My internals know when I need to focus on other things, or to be more precise, my brain knows it, and keeps the internals away if something needs my attention.

Furthermore I was raised in a pretty conservative family, and while I had much love, support and a happy home, I always felt like the weird one, and not in an encouraging sort of way, so during childhood I believed I had little business having any of the weird thoughts and curiosities I did. I still had them, but I kept quiet about them and to this day it's hard for me to fully accept them. Because of this, a part of me still holds on to traditional, so-called boring neurotypical values. Without them, I feel I would have no guidance, no way of knowing my place or my duties in this big scary world.

Put simply, I prefer to be weird, but I spent way too much time teaching myself how not to be weird because I felt I had to. learning to fit in and understand the point of normal existance was as important to me as learning how to spell. If I didn't do it, nobody would take me seriously. That's how I felt as a kid, and I still experience that a little.

I don't know if this mindset makes sense to anyone here. One of my friends finds my living in the middle approach kind of strange. But he's way more into internal worlds, and metaphysical/telepathy/energy perception stuff than I am. I can't connect to most of that. I have a bit of a connection with perceptive stuff, but I don't try to read people. Instead, I try to draw connections between senses, emotions and thoughts, pretty much in my own mind. It's more like synesthesia I think. Whatever it is, it's not something I could call an energy that actually exists or could be perceived by everyone. After all, the brain is a powerful, influenceable thing, and I'm thoroughly convinced that any belief, no matter how far-fetched or absurd, is genuinely felt by at least a small group of people.

So yeah, my friend has a hard time going outside of those thoughts I think. Always stuck in his internal world with whoever is willing to go with him, and working with magic and energy and the other things he does. At times he seems so against neurotypical stuff because it's boring, uninteresting etc. Sometimes he can come off to me as not really willing to give a neurotypical a chance. I don't think he means it, but I do wonder.

So yeah, I'm not exactly sure what to make of internal stuff. I personally need to balance it with reality and at times I wonder if it's just an escape and nothing more. But other people like my friend practically live in their own heads and wouldn't contemplate having it any other way.
Edit: clarifications