(So called) lack of imagination

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I'd say my imagination is overactive in some situations, and just plain lacking in some other.

When I was a kid, I loved to play with toys (and I did come up with imaginative plots) but it took me quite a while to let other people in my games. The few months that I spent in kindergarden, I was always up in the afternoon while every other child was taking a nap... and I'd play with the toys... it took me until age 6 to learn to play with other people, but I've always found it sort of... boring. I prefer computer games lol.

I'm also sort of unimaginative socially... most of my friends think I'm funny because I make a lot of funny remarks on what they say but I always dread it when somebody comes over to our house because my mind goes blank, and they just sit there waiting for ME to decide what to do or to say something because I'm the hostess and it's more proper or some crap like that.

I remember a time when someone came round to my house and we did nothing for almost the whole time because I didn't know what to do. We found something eventually but I have a feeling it was probably something only I wanted to do

I played lots of imagination-based games as a child. I wasn't too good at playing them with other kids though.

I got sidetracked in my last statement. I, a middle aged man, actually have the same kind of imagination I did when I was younger. OK, my dreams seem simpler, but that is it. I can still remember some of my earlier fantasies, and can still appreciate them. And HEY, I often go through interactions and possible interactions, and it can seem almost real.

Steve

Noetic writes,
I played dolls with a girl who was the daughter of my Mum's friend, but she soon declared I was "boring" because I just kept dressing and underssing the doll.

I had a rather large box of barbies and clothes for them when I was younger, the only thing I found interesting was mixing and matching outfits. Although later I found out they were decent to chew. Sorta lie gum, only more work involved. Anyway, my parents gave 'em to the next door neighbor when I was six, I suppose they thought I found it boring. It wasn't boring per se, it was just...there.

I like my imagination, but my only complaint is that I need specific starting points of reference in order to be able to imagine some things. For instance, when painting or writing I can't create a character out of thin air. I've tried, all I do is draw blanks. I need a working description. Music works wonderfully for this, as some songs describe situations and scenery. I get almost all of my paintings and plots from songs. The rest come from what I'd either like to see or read about in a specific way, using myself as a reference point.

I'm good at using my imagination for recreational purposes, but I'm impaired when it comes to problem-solving real world situations.

As a kid I was always playing "imagining" with a friend of mine, but thinking back, I think he might be an aspie too. I remember playing house with a few other first graders on the playground, but I was only playing so I could hang out in my favorite spot on the playground, and I played the wife and sent the husband off to work and the kids off to school and stayed home alone, playing my own thing. I still like to do RPGs, but I tend to play similar characters from one game to another, and although I like them (I've figured out the social rules through them) the EXHAUST me to play.

My big lack of imagination is that if I try to figure out what will happen tomorrow, for instance, I can only see one outcome. If that doesn't happen, I'm completely lost, and I tend to have panic attacks right then - and once I start panicking, I can only see one outcome again, only it's usually disaster.

I have a very active imagination for completely useless stuff... (but only until there's a market for Goodies fanfic, then I'm gonna make a fortune! ) but ask me to predict how a social scene will unfold, pick which person in a group would be most approachable, predict how a given person will react to something... nope, sorry, can't do that.

I'll also stew over a social sitation that went wrong (or that hasn't happened yet, imagining how it could go wrong) over and over again, but it won't make the next similar experience the slightest bit easier. It's like driving an unfamiliar car - every time I have a conversation, the controls are all in different places and you have to refamiliarise yourself from scratch over and over again.

I'm finding social stuff a tiny bit easier as I get older but that's purely learning by example and making an intellectual decision what to do, not any increased ability to predict what'll happen and doing it 'by instinct'.

I know that I have a pretty decent imagination for just about anything. I can come up with full fantasy worlds, often see solutions to mathematical or engineering problems which others don't, and can hypothesize about different social structures. What more do they want?