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5:00am February 2, 2013

Just woke from a dream

I’m very stiff and clearly having trouble with movement, which must have prompted the dream. In the dream, lots of people with developmental disabilities of all kinds were describing our relationships to movement, usually in fairly complex terms. As in, not just simplistic ideas of “gross/fine motor control” but the more complicated movement difficulties you usually see in autistic people (even those without “autistic catatonia” itself often have similar traits), as well as many people with intellectual disabilities, CP, brain injury, etc.

The whole point was to build some kind of tool to help us communicate when we were having trouble with movement, telling people what we were trying to do and what they could do to assist us, all using as simple a communication mechanism as possible.

When I wake up with so much motor planning trouble that typing is difficult, I really wish dreams like that were coming true.

[The kind of more complex motor problems I’ve described are best described as difficulty with {starting, stopping, executing, continuing, combining, switching} affecting {postures, actions, speech, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, memories}. Which first appeared in a book by Martha Leary and Donnellan, of which there’s now a new and much improved version out that quotes a lot of us. Not all people have the condition some autistic people have where parts of these difficulties are progressively heightened slowly over time, but many people with developmental disabilities have difficulties in these areas, whether stable or not.]

At any rate any device where I just had to hit a couple buttons to explain what I was trying to do and how to help me do it? I only wish. The technology to set it up already exists, but the ability to set up the technology efficiently enough to be of any use would take a rare understanding of how to set up communication devices, and an equally rare understanding of how these complex motor problems work.