Discovering My Autism

I was intending to write something upbeat, but to be honest, I feel down and disconnected at the moment.

Lately I’ve been having vivid dreams, often waking in the night drenched in sweat. The dreams themselves aren’t random. They carry a sense of responsibility, emotional pressure, and unfinished business — the sort of things that sit quietly in the background during the day and then come forward when everything else goes quiet.

Doing a little research — well, a lot really; I don’t know what a little research looks like for me — I discovered that this pattern is well described in sleep research, particularly in autistic adults. Not as something pathological, and not as a “feature” of autism in itself, but as a response to sustained emotional load.

What seems to be happening is this: when emotional stress doesn’t get fully processed during the day, my brain keeps the loops open. Autistic brains are often very good at holding responsibility, tracking consequences, and replaying unresolved situations. At night, especially during REM sleep, those open loops don’t shut down — they get processed instead. The body reacts as if something important is happening, because to the nervous system, it is. Heart rate rises, temperature regulation drops, and I wake up sweaty and alert, remembering far more of the dream than I normally would.

Understanding this has helped. Not because it magically fixes anything, but because it reframes what’s going on. This isn’t my body malfunctioning, and it isn’t “autism doing something odd”. It’s my system working hard under emotional strain, finishing work at night that it hasn’t felt able to complete during the day.

There’s a temptation, when you’re autistic, to explain everything through autism itself. In this case, though, the distinction matters. The dreams and night sweats aren’t autism; they’re the result of emotional stress meeting a brain that doesn’t easily close unfinished loops. That difference feels important to me — and oddly reassuring.

I’m learning that the answer isn’t to analyse the dreams, or to force myself to relax, or to look for hidden meanings. It’s to reduce how much unresolved responsibility I carry into the night, and to treat these dreams not as messages, but as processing.

For now, that understanding is enough. It gives me a little more compassion for myself — and a little less fear when I wake up in the dark, heart racing, sheets damp, knowing that what I’m feeling is my nervous system working overtime, not something broken.