The Passage of Time

[Divrom]

It's been a while since I've been on this site, so give me a second to get acquainted with things as they are now...

In the meantime, I wanted to ask, does anyone else have issues with the perception of time?

I have lost count of the number of times, I would be having a conversation with someone and Id say something like, "two months ago..." And my ex would interrupt and inform me that it was two years ago.

Or, my CPN would ask when I got a letter from so-and-so team and I'd say 8 weeks. It would turn out that it was 9months ago.

I don't see much written about this, but for me personally time-perception - along with sensory issues - contributes to most of my negative experiences of Aspergers. If I could address this, it might fix my sleep, my perception of pain, my inability to cook, social difficulties and more.

Anyone else on the same page? Am I the only one who thinks this is not talked about enough?

 

[Blast off]

I have the same problem. Pisses my wife off greatly. Also, sometimes I lose whole days or even weeks and I'll be like "what? Its July already? I thought it was May"... Time sometimes seems irrelevant to me especially if I'm not working or socializing.
Expression of pain is also a problem and bright lights, noisy crowded rooms, high pitched stims, voices, and even laughter. I am also overly sensitive to heat and humidity.

 

[Judge]

I only seem to lose time on occasion in infrequent shutdowns.

A stress reaction or a manifestation of autistic catatonia? Though I suppose that's something beyond just losing time in seconds, minutes, hours etc.. Where I can't seem to account for what happened between a meltdown and when I recover. Or maybe when it happens I just don't care about anything. I'm not sure....

 

[Suzanne]

I actually opened a thread on this subject, because it occurred to me that yes, I get confused, but in the opposite direction; rather than not that long ago, I feel it was a long time ago.

I get in a panic when I have a lot to do, despite how organised I am, because I need my relaxation time, before making dinner in the evening and I am always surprised with how fast things go and actually feel at a loss and wish I had spread things out a bit more.

I need to know the time, because if I do not, I feel that I am floundering.

 

[xudo]

Yes. To the point that I'll say "oh yeah in the 90's" like that was 10 years ago. Someone then has to point out how long ago the 90's were. I find myself trying to remember what year I was in in school, and then working out the year that way. (This is usually when someone brings up a film/song/show and I underestimate how long ago it was since it came out)

In terms of shorter periods of time, I'm terrible at that too. I'm always taken by surprise by how fast time has passed and I usually forget what day it is, or think it's a different day.

 

[nagibator]

It's been a while since I've been on this site, so give me a second to get acquainted with things as they are now...

In the meantime, I wanted to ask, does anyone else have issues with the perception of time?

I have lost count of the number of times, I would be having a conversation with someone and Id say something like, "two months ago..." And my ex would interrupt and inform me that it was two years ago.

Or, my CPN would ask when I got a letter from so-and-so team and I'd say 8 weeks. It would turn out that it was 9months ago.

I don't see much written about this, but for me personally time-perception - along with sensory issues - contributes to most of my negative experiences of Aspergers. If I could address this, it might fix my sleep, my perception of pain, my inability to cook, social difficulties and more.

Anyone else on the same page? Am I the only one who thinks this is not talked about enough?

I'm pretty good with time in the sense that I don't care about it at all. I observe it however, as it is part of living on this planet.

I don't remember all dates, but when something is important then I know it.

What I'm shifty about though is writing numbers and or dates down. I sometimes don't notice that I'm off or have substituted one thing with another.

 

[Ronin82]

Huh, I thought this was part of the extreme dissociation of my PTSD....but now that I think about it, I've never really been good at noting the passage of time, even as a very young kid. In any case, I think it stems from some level of dissociation in both disorders. I may be wrong, but that's what I think.

 

[the_tortoise]

I have huge issues with time perception. Although I don't get it wrong as often as I just have absolutely no idea when something happened, or how long it's been since something started or ended.

I use clues from my memory -- like, if I remember reading a specific book and the memory shows the house with the walls of this color then I would have been between these ages which makes it [x] number of years ago. For some reason the time-related data as numbers (e.g. I lived in this house at these ages) is stored totally separately from everything else (if that data is not there at all....often it's not....then I have no idea what date a memory is from and probably never will unless I can do some very obtuse/obscure linking across other associated memories that do have that kind of numbers-data).

I usually have no sense of time passing, either. 5 minutes may not feel any different from 5 hours.

 

[Judge]

Lost time I do find disturbing. Yet I can only recall it having happened well after the fact. Though I suppose it's unrelated to things like sleep walking which I've witnessed before and find both fascinating and disturbing.

It does bother me that I really don't know what the source of this sort of thing really is in my own case.

 

[Allicat]

My 12 year old also has issues with time. He sometimes thinks things that happened within the recent past happened years ago, yet paradoxically might think something that happened to him as a little kid occurred recently. He has the hardest time remembering things we've done, which is why I try to get photos of places we go and things we do; with a visual it generally will come back to him.

Wasn't til reading this post that I realized it's probably a spectrum issue - thank you!

 

[Judge]

He has the hardest time remembering things we've done, which is why I try to get photos of places we go and things we do; with a visual it generally will come back to him.

Sounds like a good idea. Give him a physical guide to his past. Glad I have one, with a father who insisted on slides of everything up to a certain point in time.

 

[Divrom]

I have huge issues with time perception. Although I don't get it wrong as often as I just have absolutely no idea when something happened, or how long it's been since something started or ended.

...I usually have no sense of time passing, either. 5 minutes may not feel any different from 5 hours.

Thanks for the replies, folks. Glad to hear I'm not the only one! This is such a core issue for me that it feels central to my experience of Asperger's (along with sensory issues).

It happens both ways too. 3 years can feel like 1 month, or 5 minutes can feel like 4 hours. That means I am not very good with pain as I lose all sense of time and it feels like it is going on forever.

All of this means that I am very dangerous to have in a kitchen. Also, I prefer somewhere with a big large clock, yet - ironically - will then check that clock repeatedly as I fixate on the time.

 

[Judge]

In the last few years I've had a strong sense of time moving too fast.

Perhaps because I sense I'm simply running out of it.

Still, I find momentarily losing time at any stretch disturbing.

 

[nagibator]

In the last few years I've had a strong sense of time moving too fast.

Perhaps because I sense I'm simply running out of it.

Still, I find momentarily losing time at any stretch disturbing.

It is actually moving faster. However the thing with time is, it doesn't really exist. @Divrom's observation about using a clock in order to track time is pretty relevant. For if you have nothing to count time or know that time has passed you wouldn't know.

What we commonly refer to as time is a change of state. The original time was the change of the suns position relative to the earth. But is a change of position also a change of time?

I've recently bee into visualising time and experiences of it. A good way is always to use the ocean as a reference.

Say you are a boat and there is tide happening due to the suns and moons pull on the water. Would you know it if it was in the middle of the ocean and you had no other reference points to account for it?

If that big tidal wave was the ticking of a clock. Would you notice it? As far as I can tell, only things that are small enough for us to comprehend and attend can be noticed by us.

The fact that the solar system is racing through the universe usually doesn't bother me, as I also usually am not aware of the change.

Why? I sleep at night and don't look into the night sky often, and when I do, most of what I see are a few stars, not important enough for me to check if they have changed position.

There is a state called flow. Where you are one with what you are doing and cannot notice time. It's kind of like the boat analogy above. If you are the change, you won't notice change.