Spogg wrote:I have no idea, but I wonder if some conditions are related to the dream creation software kicking in and bypassing the waking software
That's pretty astute, I think. Long before my autism was diagnosed, I always used to explain it to myself as me having a brain where parts of it went to sleep independently of the rest - and so, in turn, I blamed it entirely on the sleep-deprivation caused by insomnia (that may even be a component of it - insomnia is so common for autistic people that it's hard to tell). Whenever I told this theory to anyone else, they usually just poo-pood it, so I learned to keep it to myself (as with many other weird or embarrassing things that I've since learned are autism-related).
In the case of your dreams, I would guess that it's really not so different to my experience. Your language circuits happen to be turned off for their nightly "servicing" at the moment of having that dream, so the dream isn't able to include any linguistic content - the reading/writing program of the "holodeck" is disabled, so to speak.The only difference is that my language circuits (or whatever it happens to be) are shutting down while I'm otherwise awake. Even that isn't unique to neurological conditions, though - most people will understand the experience of being completely "lost for words" following an extreme shock - it's just that in some conditions, the amount of sensory or emotional input required for the brain to go into "energy saving mode" is different. Even the common experience of struggling to find a word that's "on the tip of your tongue" is a very minor version of the same thing, I expect.
Spogg wrote:I start to think that I’ve had some sort of stroke or dementia, and it’s horrible.
I've read some interesting stuff about the intersection between autism and dementia. For quite a while, there have been anecdotal reports that autistic people seem to be protected against dementia (particularly Alzheimer's). There's no obvious organic pathology which would explain this, nor any genetic commonality that's known. The most obvious explanation is that autistic people are already accustomed to many of the effects of Alzheimers - i.e. the cognitive deficits are not as horrifying if they've been familiar since infancy, and we've already had a lifetime of devising and using coping strategies for them. It's been mooted that autistic people might even have a useful contribution to make towards counselling and support for folks with Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia.