Dream Log: Social Awkwardness In Bonn

In real life I spent the 1989-90 academic year as a student at the University of Bonn. Other famous alumni of that university include Marx, Heine and Nietzsche, so it makes sense that I was a student there too. The former palace of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne --

-- houses the humanities departments of the university, so when I was there I regarded it as pretty much the entire university. Turns out they've got a lot of other stuff going on in different buildings. The title of Elector signifies that the Archbishop was one of the 7 princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The palace, built in the late 17th and early 18th century, looks pretty much the same on the outside as it always has; on the inside, very disappointingly, it looks exactly the same as a huge university building without big enough windows. Lots of concrete.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to Bonn. Just as in 1989-90, I moved into a student dormitory and spent little time or energy on academic things, concentrating on my social life instead. Some of the people I had met in Bonn as fellow students 27 years ago had also come back.

I felt that a lot of them were shunning me. I wasn't sure, but that's how it felt. That's how it feels being autistic a lot of the time: socially awkward, entirely unsure how welcome or unwelcome one is in a given social situation.

Someone I knew from 1989-90 was spending some of his time with a tight-knit group of younger students, students of a more typical age for college attendance. At one point I and my friend from back then and a small young man from the younger group were sitting at a long table in what may have been a university cafeteria. Whatever the building was used for, at that moment it was relatively empty. The younger guy was very energetically working at a large notebook, drawing things which looked liked artistic images and scientific diagrams and equations at the same time. The three of us were talking and to me the conversation felt rather strained. In the conversation, it came up that the young guy could do Rain Man-level arithmetic in his head. I was like, Oh yeah? and gave him pairs of numbers to multiply in his head. He fired products back at me right away, without slowing down his work in his large notebook. The problems were to large for me to do in my head, and I was a little annoyed with myself that I didn't write them down along with his answers so that I could check them later with a calculator. I was unsure whether he was calculating accurately or just messing with me. In any case, he knew enough that his answers had the correct numbers of digits and ended with the correct number. for example, if I'd asked him to multiply 563 times 477, his immediate answer had 6 digits and ended with 1.

I was completely uncertain, not just about the multiplication: I didn't know whether the work the young man was doing was art, math, science or all three simultaneously or something else; I didn't know whether he was doing this as schoolwork or for some other purpose; and I had no idea whatsoever whether my presence there was welcome, indifferent or unwelcome to the other two.

Then it was night and I was outside and it was cold. I saw a friend or acquaintance of mine (I didn't know how he would describe me to others) going into a house where a party was going on inside, and I slipped inside right behind him.

John Goodman, the actor who played Rosanne's husband and has appeared in many Coen Brothers movies, was sitting at a table just inside. In the dream, he was one of the people I knew from Bonn 1989-90. He saw me immediately, and rushed me straight back outside into the cold and started walking me briskly away from the house and the party. Sometimes it's clear to me that I haven't been welcome somewhere, and this was one of those times.

At the same time, though, John Goodman's attitude toward me was not clear. He said something to me about my being dressed all wrong for the party. I had no idea whether I really was unacceptably dressed for the party, or if I was unwelcome there for other reasons. I didn't know whether the problem was me specifically or if any party crasher would've been rushed right straight back outside. I tried to get some clarification from John about this, but I didn't get anywhere with that. He was talking to me a mile a minute, and I didn't understand what the problem was at all. Maybe John and the other people at that party never wanted to see me on any social occasion, and John's talk was intended to keep me from seeing this too clearly and becoming enraged over it. I didn't know whether John and/or others had heard that I was autistic, or if some of them equated "autistic" with "crazy" and "crazy" with "dangerous." (The truth is, I'm as harmless as a puppy.) Maybe there really was no problem here except that I was in jeans and a T-shirt and sweatshirt and hooded winter jacket instead of the somewhat slicker attire of the other guests: nice-looking button-down shirts and overcoats for the guys, skirts for many of the ladies, like that. Maybe that really was the only reason why John rushed me out. Maybe it was somewhere in between. I had no idea.

At this point, I just wanted to get away from John and from the party. John mumbled something about his having heard I'd been diagnosed with something, and asked what that was about. Again, I was completely unsure whether this was friendly concern, or an attempt to muddy some waters, or something else entirely. I yelled at John, "It's called autism! Millions of us have it! Google it! Good night!"

I'm Stupid, And I Want Help!

I don't have much to say -- why doesn't anybody believe that?! I'm pretty much in the dark. I don't know all that much. I don't know what I can help you out with. I don't know anything I can tell you now. I've got 7 guides to Germany and Austria here in front of me now, plus a map, that's all I can tell you. There's a green Michelin guide to West Germany and Berlin, from the mid-80's, and one to Austria and the Bavarian Alps, that one's from 1969. They're both in English. Then there's 2 Baedeckers in English from the 1980's, one for Cologne and the other for the Rhine.

The rest are in German. 2 Baedecker Autoresiefuehrers, Oesterreich, 1958, and Deutschland, 1960. Then a Baedecker Rheinlande from 1909. That just leaves the map. It's a Berlin Falkplan. I got it when I was in Berlin in 2004. It's got all of the folds. The folds confuse me. The map is hard for me to use -- because I'm stupid! And I'm not even in Europe! I just look at these maps and guides and pretend I'm there! What do you want from me?!

I didn't know life was going to be like this -- one thing after the other, on and on. People negotiate tough and deals close fast and sometimes, years later, I figure out what happened in front of my eyes, and in the meantime stuff has kept on going on, constantly, so even though I someone eventually figure out what some people were talking about, I still just get farther and farther behind.

The movies said there was something in it for me. Something on my own.

My own! Did you ever stop to consider that maybe I'd just rather you sent me off to to this, to do that, take care of some Micky Mouse dogwalking job! Send me to pick somebody up at the airport! That sort of thing maybe I could've handled! I know, I know, I screwed up that one pet-sitting job, and I'm really sorry. Those dogs deserved better. I just wasn't up to the task, it overwhelmed me.

Mom would've liked for me to've become an accountant. That the way she wanted it. But it ain't the way I wanted it! I can't handle things! I can't even get the damn squirrels out of my own crawlspaces! I'm dumb -- not like everyone says, like... smart! I'm DUMB, and I want help!

Tell you about the investigation?! What investigation?! There's an investigation?! See, this is what I'm trying to tell you, this is what happens when people think I'm smart, and they can leave me in charge of things and everything will be fine! How many times do I have to screw up before people realize that just because I ace some IQ test, it doesn't mean... anything! At all!

I've been looking for the Alexanderplatz on this Berlin Falkplan map for three days, and I just found it now, and I'm fluent in German! This is what I'm trying to tell you! I need help! What I just said a minute ago, about how people should send me to pick up someone at the airport -- no! No! I was just bragging! Don't give me a job like that, I'll screw it up! And like I said, with the pet sitting -- I screwed it up! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!

I Have This Strange Non-Talent --

-- I compose snatches of very bad music in my sleep. The closest I can remember to composing an entire very bad song in my sleep was when I dreamed about this aging metal band. They had huge handlebar moustaches and severe mullets. Some members of the band still wore black leather vests over bare torsos years after they should have stopped going shirtless. I can't recall the lyrics of the verses anymore, except that each verse was a rhyming couplet. Just one rhyming couplet. I haven't forgotten the chorus yet, but there's not that much to remember. Here's the whole chorus, set to a clanking, rumbling metal train that sounds as if could grind to a halt completely at any moment:

"Rollin'. Rollin'. Rollin'. Rollin'."

I'm pretty sure the verses all described people who were not rollin' down that road with the band, and were jealous. It was all very, very sad and unimpressive. Wait, I just remembered one of the verses!

"And you know that I love it/If they don't, they can shove it."

As I said -- very, very sad and unimpressive.

But recently I dreamed up a couple of bars' worth of a song, and although if I were objective I might see that it's as awful as anything I've composed while asleep, I can't be objective about it. I like it. The way that someone might take home the most pathetically-crippled dog or cat from the shelter, not to be noble, but because they really and truly fell in love with the poor thing. I keep singing it.

Here are the lyrics to my three-legged puppy of a dreamed few seconds' worth of music:

"Won't you help MEEEEEEEEEE/To unnerstan[...]"

That's right: not "understand," but "unnerstan." This music is too pathetic to have d's.

But very much unlike the tired clanking rumbling metal anthem about rollin' down that road and leaving the jealous haters behind,

"Won't you help MEEEEEEEEEE/To unnerstan[...]"

is about me. It's about my autism, and being baffled by the behavior of most people, and asking for help in tryin' to unnerstan everthing.

I don't really know how obvious it is to others that I'm "special." More obvious to some than to others, I guess. And some of those more perceptive ones have been very kind, and have done a lot to try to help meeeeeee to unnerstan. And I guess that those are the people that I'm talking to when I say things like "thnk yu verr mutch pleez, yur verr nice persun." Or: "Won't you help MEEEEEEEEEE/To unnerstan."

I haven't yet read an entire novel or story by David Foster Wallace, but recently I read a meme with a quote from him (I checked it out and it's really from him), in which, if I've understood him correctly, he says that perhaps being human means being

"unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, [...] in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool"

And if Wallace is right about that -- assuming I'm right about what he's saying -- then it means that I'm not so different from the neurologically-typical as I sometimes think, because I'm most definitely -- all that, that Wallace said, there. Maybe the autism has to do more with expressing my essence in an unusual way, than with my essence being unusual. Maybe sometimes those verr nice persuns have not so much been taking pity on me, as responding to things they recognize within themselves. As one not-quite-right-looking infant to another.

Dream Log: The Delightful, Difficult Autistic-Human Interface

Last night I had a series of dreams which were about a previous night's series of dreams. Last night, I dreamed that the difficulties I had faced during the earlier night's dreams were due to my misunderstanding of the autistic-human interface, and that the solution was to understand the underlying human motivation whenever it is at odds with the ostensible reasons for the given event.

Get it? Got it? Good. It seemed like a big breakthrough while I was still asleep, but sometimes what seems like brilliance when I'm asleep turns out to be pretty much nothing when I wake up. We'll see whether or not I've actually had a breakthrough.

But first I should probably explain what I mean by the "autistic-human interface." We -- by which I mean we autistic people -- find you humans to be fascinating, lovable creatures -- and by "humans" I mean the 99% or so of you who are not autistic. We like you, but we often find it very difficult to care for you and provide healthy environments for you, conditions in which you can thrive to the utmost, because we don't understand how your brains work, and we very often do not understand what you are trying to communicate with your words and actions. To name just one example, there's the whole eye-contact thing. Boy, you humans really like to make a lot of eye contact! It's only been in the past several years, with the help of therapists specializing in aspects of the autistic-human interface, that I've noticed how much eye contact most of you consider to be normal. How much? Way too much for me in most circumstances, thank you very much! So don't take it personally if I don't look you in the eye nearly as much as you think I might. It doesn't have anything to do with me not liking you, or liking you too much and being all shy about that, or with me being a shifty coward instead of a "real" man -- no, it's just an aspect of the autistic-human interface. We may look the same and share a lot of the same DNA, but we autistic people are genetic mutants, and we're different from you humans. The eye contact issue is one of many, many examples.

So anyway, I don't remember much about the previous night's dreams except that in those dreams I was pondering the interface, as I do quite a lot in dreams and also while awake. Last night's dreams had to with improving the interface. First of all, I was in a very crowded mall with Matt LeBlanc (a movie star again). I often find crowds very stressful, as many autistic people do, but it helps if I'm with some other people and I'm involved with them either by conversation or by some shared task or by sharing an experience, like at a movie or sporting event. In the mall Matt and I, autistic and human united in a single purpose, were attempting to help some senior citizens shop. But it was so crowded and there was so much pushing and shoving in the crowd, and the senior citizens themselves were so energetic, running this way and that, that Matt and I had to agree that our efforts had met with only partial success, if that, but that we had gained some insight into the interface. We shook hands, and that was the end of the 1st dream. (Matt's hair wasn't grey.)

In the next dream I was outside in a Midwestern semi-urban environment. I and many other people were energetically running and jumping across the landscape, sometimes leaping from roof to roof in suburban subdivisions or leaping across narrow canyons, in a large-scale effort to do... something. If it was clear to me during the dream what all of us were doing, it's gone now, except that there were hundreds of us, too many to communicate with all of the rest in the midst of so much action and motion, and that we were all united in... something. Like maybe distributing bottled water to the populace, because the water supply had been contaminated, or the water-delivery system had been damaged. I mention this only as a possibility, because I don't remember what our shared purpose was, if I even ever knew it to begin with while I was dreaming.

A sub-group within the group of us, a couple dozen people, had paused in a parking lot to get organized for the next step. It was a parking lot but all of us were on foot. I had been given the task of explaining to this sub-group what we needed to do next, and how we were going to do it. The plan was very clear to me, it would have been very simple to communicate the plan to these several dozen people, except that every time that I began to speak, Mila Kunis (movie star!) and another young woman, sitting cross-legged on a blanket, began to talk to each other very loudly in a Slavic language. I stopped talking, and they stopped talking, and as soon I began again they began again. It seemed very clear that they were deliberately interfering with my prepping the group for the next action to be taken, although it was not all clear to me why they were doing it.

And that's when I had what seemed to me, while I was dreaming, like an epiphany about the autistic-human interface, which, now that I'm awake, seems like it might be be nothing. The possible epiphany is this: it's good for an autistic person, observing humans, to see the difference, if he or she can, between the explicit motivation for the event, and the implicit motivation for the behavior within the event which seems to contradict the event's explicit motivation.

For example: say that we were all there to get bottled water to people who needed it. That was the explicit motivation of the event which had brought us all together. I had the same explicit motivation in attempting to address the people in the parking lot. Now say that Mila and her friend were making a joke by repeatedly interrupting me in a Slavic language. That would mean that the implicit motivation of their repeated interruption was humor. Nothing wrong with humor in the midst of a day of hard, important work. Perhaps humans could easily see the implicit motivation of the actions of Mila and her friend. Perhaps, if I were human instead of autistic, I would know what to do. Perhaps a human would know exactly how to react, in a way which would make everyone laugh, and we were all tired and the laughter would re-energize all of us, and then it would be appropriate for me to continue sharing the plan for the next phase of action.

That's the possible epiphany: see something that at first looks to me like hostile disruption of the explicit purpose of the event, try to grasp the implicit motivation, see if maybe it's not hostile at all, react to the implicit motivation, rather than becoming angry at the disruption of the larger explicit purpose. Because perhaps Mila and her friend had no intention at all of hindering the explicit purpose, but just felt a need, not just on their parts, but on the part of the group -- maybe even on my part as well -- to blow off some steam for just a moment, before returning to the explicit purpose, the distribution of the bottled water.

Epiphany? Crap? Part-epiphany, part-crap? I don't know.