As a Child, Were You Good at Imaginative Play?

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I played quite imaginatively and according to my high school English teacher, wrote quite imaginatively as well. That was always one thing that irked me about the description of ASD. That and the emotion thing (I'm pretty "flat," but I know others who aren't).

Yes and no. I don't actually remember to be honest xD I do remember I liked to run around my neighbours garden re-enacting the Resident Evil games, but that's about all I can remember from imaginative play.

I had tons of imagination as a kid. But yet if you told me to write about anything, I would have trouble. I even struggled in writer's workshop and free write. Same as telling me to write a story. When it came to playing, I had no trouble with it. But yet I would struggle with creating things and could never create my own courses or race tracks in games. I am just not that creative. Same as coming up with my own designs when it comes to Knex or Legas or blocks. Always had trouble.

I was delayed. By the time I wanted to "play house" my peers had grown out of it.

Yes, I could turn almost everything I saw into a thousand different things. If I was to play on a small patch of grass with just 1 tree what you can't really climb, I could just turn that little patch into a thousand different things (OK, exaggerating there but you know what I mean). Sadly I lost this ability when I was about 10, and from 11-13 I could only play imaginative games without using so much pretend ''background''. Then after 13 I sort of stopped playing imaginative games altogether.

I don't think I was ever into it then as I am now. I still have imaginary friends but i remember back then when I was always playing in rocks or swinging at school. I never really understood the concept of playing with barbies. I would always spend more time dressing them and undressing them instead of actually 'playing pretend' with them or sometimes just moving them around and such.

It wasn't until I was around thirteen or fourteen when i got into it. We had an incline on our driveway and a pretty good sized field area next to our house. I was obsessed with nascar then and I would pretend I was in a nascar race, start from the incline on my bike and ride around the field and come back up. XD I also played with matchbox cars and made chalk roads and buildings for them....then my dad ran over my cars. ._.

I also had younger cousins who were, at the time under seven or eight and they always enjoyed playing house or playing school. I was thirteen of fourteen when i played with them and actually enjoyed playing those games with them. I was more at the level of my cousins than I was at my actual age level. Now I've sort of outgrown playing things like that. I don't like playing with younger kids anymore.

So I did get into imaginative play but it wasn't until i was older. I guess it counts that I did have some developmental delays.

I think I was pretty good at it. The only thing was, I wasnt playing with dolls like other little girls did. I was the character. I would pretend to be a lion or a dog most of the time. I ended up convinced that I really was a dog. I bit a few people, scratched them, barked at them, growled at them and carried things in my mouth as a walked on 4 legs. This lasted until I was 11 years old.

Yes, I had "imaginative play."

No, I have no idea how "good" I was at it. Most of my time was spend arranging my action figures (mostly figures of animals) into "societies." I would build houses, lakes, invent the forms of government, ect. Sometimes I got around to actually acting-out scenarios, but they were mostly based on junk I saw on TV, or I would invent a script I liked, and then I would keep repeating it.

I preferred not to play with other children because they screwed everything up.

As for role-playing, I always pretended to be an animal. My mother joked that I didn't learn how to walk on two feet until I was ten since I was eternally charging around the house on all fours.

ANYWAY......I told this to my psychologist, but he insisted that the DSM-IV criteria doesn't require a lack of "pretend play" to be DXed with Aspergers. It's also worth noting that I have many ADHD-PI traits, and they might be altering the AS traits a bit (just a theory). And the DSM-V criteria specifies that it's SOCIAL IMAGINATION that matters, not whether or not yo played in your room, by yourself, with your "My Little Ponies" figurines.

Is that "normal?" I don't know. I didn't play with other children enough to know what "normal" is.

I am pretty unimaginative. As a young child I took my toys apart rather than play with them. Later I would play with them but I didn't act or imagine fictional scenarios. The play was all reality based, for example making a really complicated Hot Wheels car track then seeing how fast I could get the cars to run down it.

I also found an old school report a while back where the English teacher comments on my lack of imagination.

Im not so good to imagine things.

But i did have a special ability to play in my little own world.

When i was a kid way back before you had computers atleast unless you were rich

I played a lot with Lego, i have those flat pieces with roads, think i had some 20 of them i would build huge cities and such with security and stuff. It was hilarious. so i guess i must have had some sort of good imagination.

But im not very good at picturing stuff in my imagination, like how my apartment would be if i painted all the walls blue or something.

If imaginative play equates to lining up toys, biting them, and copying stuff from films, then yes.

I had a big fixation on the mouth when I was little, and therefore I would too find one thing that I wanted to do over and over and over again, the action being opening and closing a "mouth" on different objects. Such as a shadow-puppet made with my hand, or two backpack straps put together, or the blades of scissors, or a hair-clip, or actual hand-puppets.

But I would think up random character profiles and strange situations for these characters to be in so that I could make the opening and closing motions for the mouth as much as I wanted to—like a dinner party.

Sometimes I would have a fixation on a certain word, so when I was playing alone I'd talk aloud and have the characters in the story have a conversation in which they would continuously say my favourite words.

I never became consumed by my fixation, I found ways to let my imagination stimulate it.

I always have had a vivid imagination. I didn't like playing with other children, because they would always break the rules of the imagination. I would imagine on my own.

I used to think the statements about imaginative play and AS didn't apply to me since I spend much of my childhood either daydreaming or acting out stories in an imaginary world, interacting with imaginary friends/characters, and the few times I played with other children I drew them into the fantasy too. For instance, I used to invent real-life "Mario games" for my little brother to play, fighting imaginary bosses and making his way through "levels" that I would describe to him while running around in the yard. At some point, though, I heard that "imaginative play" meant acting out stories with dolls or action figures, and no, I didn't do that very much and when I did I would mostly just arrange the toys and then just sit there imagining the story taking place. Not very interactive.

I have to notice how certain pieces of conventional wisdom about AS use popular terms in a misleading way and give the impression that we are robotic/subhuman/have no inner life. It's pretty disturbing. "they have trouble putting themselves in other people's places (social imagination)" becomes "they lack imagination", while "they have trouble reading others' emotions (cognitive empathy)" becomes "they lack empathy".

When kids would want to play an imaginative game with me, I would simply just play along. I wasn't really imagining anything myself. I could imagine some things, but even now, I can never come up with mental pictures. I have a very hard time bringing up things that I've actually seen, and if I do, they disappear very quickly.

I recall with toys I didn't play with them in a manner to tell stories so much as I'd spend a lot of time mostly lining them up, making sure they were all present, setting up scenes but not really playing through the scenes.

I think that if my social imagination then was anything like my social imagination now, I didn't really do a lot of imaginative play. I do recall playing with other children, but stuff that they wanted to play (like "house") was annoying and boring to me.

I spent a lot of time daydreaming, however. I liked to try to visualize myself in my favorite stories - something that wasn't too hard being as visual as I tend to be.