Dreaming with autism
What dreams reveal about masking, misunderstanding, and finding a language that fits
I dreamed that some old friends had made a book. It was filled with unflattering photos of me, and a bar chart showing the results of a survey about me. All the responses had been critical. I left the party and found a colleague. I was crying, and he looked uncomfortable and ignored me.
Most autistic women don’t get diagnosed until adulthood
Like 80% of women with autism, I managed to sneak into adulthood undetected. My decades of deception may be attributed to society’s difficulties in spotting the symptoms in little girls. Boys are 10 times more likely to be tested than girls.
I want to take some credit too. My orchestra of careful masking and mimicking burned me out, but I likely avoided some of the penalties faced by my identified autistic friends.
“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” — D. W. Winnicott
Autism is a developmental difference that shapes how a person experiences the world. It changes how they process information and communicate. Social cues, sensory input, and unspoken expectations can feel unclear or overwhelming. Direct language and predictable structure often help. Around 2% of people have autism, but many are never diagnosed. Autism is one form of neurodiversity. That’s a term that recognises natural variation in how human brains develop and function.
After years of successful undercover work, I have now, like an increasing number of adults, finally faced the diagnostic music. The numbers are in, and the jig is up. With that comes the relief of excusing myself from the exhaustion of pretending. Permission to turn down social invitations. Permission to turn away from the intense eye contact that acquaintances confuse with politeness.
It has also brought with it an avalanche of nighttime dreams like this one. Confusing social judgment, an objective but opaque failure to meet the standard.
Late diagnosis forces a re-write of our story
Autism is mostly genetic, which means it’s been with me all my life. The ideas I had about myself- about my skills, personality flaws, and friendships needs to be, if not rewritten, then heavily reviewed.
I had always considered myself overly sensitive to interpersonal conflict. Imagining rejection where there was none. But perhaps my gut had been right.
Science paints a tricky picture of discrimination. Non-autistic people rate autistic people as 29% less likable. Experiments appear to show that they’re less likely to want to talk to autistic people, and less likely to want to be their friend. Even playground bullies seem primed to spot autism. Victimization likelihood is higher for autistic children. It’s not surprising that autistic people often expect a negative response from strangers.
“When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.” ― Jean Rhys
I am left combing through old memories and old photos, wondering if I had remembered each school teacher, party, boyfriend, job, as it had truly been.
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Had I masked enough for them to like me, or so much that they hadn’t even known me?
Dreams deliver clarity when the world is chaotic.
I have spent much of my life in a private world. Monitoring my face and my words from the inside out. Retreating when the world was too intense. We know autistic people are likely to spend more time in immersive daydreams. These are very vivid waking dreams, with plots that can be revisited again and again. Some researchers think this might be a way to explore emotions creatively. In a way that avoids the judgment that can come from conversations with non-autistic people. Maybe for similar reasons, autistic people also seem especially drawn to fantasy media.
As well as exploration and retreat, immersive daydreams might be a way for autistic people to reason. We are learning that they approach cognitive tasks differently from non-autistic people. For example, they have incredibly strong, visual mental representations. They can see concepts clearly in their mind’s eye, and many rely on this way of thinking to process information.
Another skill that seems to come more easily to autistic people is pattern recognition. Some autistic people say they see patterns not just in images, but in music, numbers, or facial expressions. It’s like accessing the underlying system, the mechanics linking everything together.
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” — Virginia Woolf
Nighttime dreams accelerate this pattern recognition benefit for me. Dreams are a place to reflect on what’s happened during waking life, and prepare for what might be coming next. We generally dream about things we have been doing or thinking about during the day. Importantly, scientists now believe that these daytime memories are reorganised during sleep. Linked together to give new insight and clarity. Transforming the messy overload of daytime information into digestible stories.
Dreams give us a language for connection.
Of the gifts offered by a dream, the most important might actually come when we wake up and tell it to another person. Autistic people are generally lonelier than non-autistic people. There are many reasons for this gap. For some, it’s needing more time alone to recharge. For others, sensory overload in the types of places people socialise is a problem. Often, communication differences add to the struggle.
Dream sharing offers a solution. After you share a dream with someone, empathy between the two of you increases by 9%. Sharing a dream with someone gives them a clear view into your internal world. For me, they are a chance to connect with other people without the often incomprehensible rules of social interaction. When I can express my emotions and ideas in a way that makes sense to me, communication challenges disappear.
A team of psychotherapists in New York experimented with this technique for autistic teenagers. The group had been limited to one-word answers when they only talked about waking experiences. But it transformed when dreams were allowed in. A young man explained he was abducted by aliens and taken to their planet. He wasn’t scared; he just wanted to understand the aliens. Through this story, and the discussion that followed, he was able to communicate his feelings of alienation. And give his peers an opportunity to express their own.
“I wasn’t failing to be a person. I was succeeding at being autistic.” — Fern Brady
Some of us dream of bar charts of failure, and others of alien examinations. Whatever the metaphor, our autistic dreams bypass the neurotypical script. They find exactly the right words to say what needs to be said.
Dreams might not have all the answers, but at least they give us permission to speak our own language.
