I go to bed. I close my eyes. And my brain, apparently unbothered by the concept of rest, continues doing exactly what it does all day, thinking, connecting, processing, sensing. The lights go out, but the engine keeps running.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how sleep worked. It is not.

The State Between

There is a neurological phenomenon called hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep where the brain is technically no longer conscious but hasn’t quite stopped thinking either. It produces thoughts and experiences so vivid and coherent that they feel completely real, because the content isn’t fantastical. You’re not flying or talking to cartoon animals. You’re lying in bed, thinking. Which is exactly what you’d be doing if you were actually awake.

For people with ADHD, this state is particularly pronounced. The ADHD brain has difficulty fully powering down. Even in sleep it keeps processing, planning, making unexpected connections, because that’s what it does, and no one told it to stop just because the body is horizontal.

I used to find this disorienting. I now find it useful. Some of my best ideas don’t come in the shower or on a walk. They come at 3am when my brain thinks I’m asleep but forgot to tell the rest of me.

The most vivid example I can give: I had been wrestling with a difficult professional situation for months. Should I address it directly? Stay quiet? The conscious, awake version of me kept circling the same options and finding none of them satisfying.

Then one Saturday morning, in that half-in, half-out state, my brain handed me something I hadn’t considered. Not a solution to the problem, a way around it entirely. An email that had nothing to do with the problem at all, that simply reconnected me with someone important, with no agenda, no complaint, no direct confrontation. My brain had quietly concluded that the problem didn’t need solving head-on. It needed patience, and a different kind of connection that might, in time, create its own resolution.

My fully awake, fully filtered brain would have kept circling. My hypnagogic brain cut the knot. I sent the email before I was even fully conscious. The outcome exceeded anything I could have engineered deliberately.

This is also, I believe, where my fraud instinct lives. The pattern recognition that fires before I can explain it. The knowing that arrives before the evidence. The prefrontal cortex, the part that edits, doubts, and overrides, is offline. What’s left is pure signal.

Forget Everything You Just Learned

During a stay at a clinic, I attended a sleep hygiene class. You know the drill: no blue light, no screens, no stimulation before bed, dark room, quiet environment. All the standard advice.

When the class ended, I walked up to the doctor and said: “I know all of this. But it doesn’t work for me. I fall asleep like a champion within five minutes of watching TV.”

He looked at me with a completely straight face and said: “Do you have ADHD?”

He had the look of a man quietly reassessing everything he thought he knew about sleep.

I said yes. He said: “Then forget everything I just taught in there. None of it applies to you. Your brain needs stimulation in order to power down. Complete silence will keep you awake.”

I have never felt more seen by a medical professional in my life! And the kicker? This was a clinic that treated many ADHD patients. Nobody thought to mention this in the class. To the room with numerous people it applied to most.

This is why my evening routine involves the TV, a game on my tablet, and often a conversation with my AI collaborator, simultaneously. Not because I can’t focus. Because I focus better with all three running at once. The ADHD brain doesn’t power down through silence. It powers down by getting just enough input to stop generating its own. Give it nothing and it will create something. Give it something manageable and it will finally, eventually, let go.

The Dreams That Aren’t Quite Dreams

Then there are the other ones. The dreams I am less sure how to explain.

In early 1994, Los Angeles was hit by the Northridge earthquake, one of the most destructive in the city’s history. I had arrived from Germany barely a year earlier and had never experienced an earthquake. In the two nights before it struck, I dreamt about it. The first night: the damage to buildings and infrastructure. The second night: the ocean, with waves rising high. People being scared, but there weren’t any real casualties. On the third night, somewhere around 4 or 5am, the ground moved.

I had been telling my then-husband about the dreams. He was baffled. I was too, honestly. But it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and it hasn’t been the last.

I learned to read Tarot in my 20s. Not because I believed the cards held the answers, but because having a tool made things easier to explain. When you know something you shouldn’t be able to know, people find it less unsettling if there’s a prop involved.

I want to be careful here, because I am not claiming supernatural powers. What I believe, and what science increasingly supports in interesting ways, is that the AuDHD brain processes an extraordinary volume of information below the level of conscious awareness. Pattern recognition operating at a depth the thinking mind never sees. Micro-signals absorbed and synthesized before they ever surface as a thought. What feels like knowing is often the brain finishing a calculation it started long before you were paying attention.

Whether that fully explains what I’ve experienced across my life, I honestly don’t know. Quantum physics has demonstrated that reality operates by rules far stranger than our daily experience suggests. I find it less unsettling to sit with the mystery than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

What I do know is that this same mechanism, whatever it is, shows up in how I detect fraud, how I read people, how I know within minutes whether someone is dishonest or truthful, being genuine or performing. It’s not intuition in the vague, hand-wavy sense. It’s information processing happening below the conscious surface, arriving as certainty before it arrives as explanation.

The Brain That Lives in Two Places

All of this connects to something I wrote about in my last post – the parallel universe, the camera feeling, the sense of existing slightly outside ordinary reality. Sleep is where that experience is most concentrated and most undeniable.

The vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life. The hypnagogic state where thought and dream are indistinguishable. The precognitive quality of certain dreams that I can’t explain away. The concept of astral travel, the idea, supported by quantum physics or Einstein’s theory of relativity, that consciousness might not be as firmly located in one place and time as we generally assume, doesn’t feel abstract to me. It feels descriptive.

I’m aware that this is the point where some readers will edge toward the door. That’s okay. I spent decades not talking about any of this for exactly that reason, the fear of sounding unhinged, of being dismissed, of losing credibility I’d worked hard to build.

But here’s what I’ve come to: a brain that has never fully powered down, that processes reality on multiple levels simultaneously, that generates its best thinking in the space between sleeping and waking, that brain is going to have experiences that don’t fit neatly into standard descriptions of consciousness. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the logical consequence of being wired this way.

What This Means for Sleep

Practically speaking, AuDHD and sleep have a complicated relationship. The brain resists shutdown. It generates vivid, sometimes startlingly real experiences in the transition states. It makes connections and solves problems overnight that the waking mind couldn’t crack. It occasionally knows things it shouldn’t.

What’s helped me most is accepting that my sleep will never look like the textbook version, and that this isn’t entirely a loss. The email that changed my year came from that half-awake state. So have ideas, insights, and moments of clarity I couldn’t have manufactured consciously.

The brain that never powers down is exhausting to live in sometimes. But it is also, quietly and consistently, doing work I didn’t ask it to do,  and occasionally the results are extraordinary.

I’ve learned to keep a notebook nearby. Just in case.

I am sitting in a meeting. Someone is talking. To all external appearances, I am present – eye contact, appropriate nodding, the occasional thoughtful expression. And then someone notices my eyes have gone glassy, that I am looking directly through them rather than at them, and they say, with increasing alarm: “STOP STARING AT ME!”

I am not staring at them. I am not even there. I left about two minutes ago and forgot to take my body with me.

Welcome to Part 2 of my relationship with time, which is less about efficiency and more about the fact that I have never been entirely sure which universe I actually live in.

The Parallel Universe

Long before I had any diagnosis, long before anyone had words for what was happening in my brain, I built myself another world.

It had different parents. In this world, I was loved without condition, I had friends, I was popular, I had everything I had wanted and I was happy. It was vivid and detailed and completely real to me, not a daydream exactly, but a place I could go. And I went there often. During school especially. Teachers would call on me and get no response, not because I was being difficult, but because I was genuinely elsewhere.

This got particularly noticeable around 4th grade and into the first half of 5th grade. Teachers scolded me for not paying attention. What they didn’t know, what I couldn’t have explained, was that I was managing two parallel lives simultaneously, and the other one was considerably more pleasant than this one.

Then, somewhere in the second half of 4th grade, I made a decision. I chose to stop going there.

Three different therapists, across different periods of my life, have independently landed on the same response when I told them this story: that I had made a conscious choice between sanity and insanity. That given everything I had experienced, I could have ended up completely lost in that other world, catatonic, unreachable, and that people had arrived at that place with far less reason than I had. They were also unanimous in their bewilderment at how I had done it, given that the cognitive ability to make that kind of decision shouldn’t have existed in a child that age.

What I told them was simple: I knew that if I kept going back, there would come a point where I couldn’t return. And as much as I loved that other world, I chose this one.

I never fully understood why I was able to make that choice. What I know now is that I was never really a child in the way the world expects children to be. I was an adult trapped in a child’s body, giving my mother relationship advice before I had even started school, sorting my toys by height on a shelf rather than playing with them, navigating adult emotional landscapes before I had the vocabulary for any of it. The cognitive ability the therapists said shouldn’t have been there, it was there, because it had to be.

The Camera

Here is something I have never talked about before.

For as long as I can remember, I have had the persistent feeling of being watched. Not in a paranoid way. I know, intellectually, that there is no camera. But I move through life with a background awareness of being observed, as if I am a character in a film and somewhere, in some other universe, an audience is watching.

I think of it as the Truman Show feeling. And like Truman, I sometimes find myself wondering: what if none of this is real? What if I actually live in that other universe, and this one is the constructed one?

This feeling has not always been unwelcome. In many ways, it kept me safe. When I was on the verge of a decision that could have gone badly, something would pull me back – the awareness of the camera, the sense that I was accountable to something larger than the moment. It kept me out of a lot of trouble. It made me follow rules even when I disagreed with them, because some part of me felt that how I behaved mattered beyond the immediate situation.

What I have since learned is that this experience has names. What I was describing, observing my own life from the outside, the feeling of existing in a kind of waking dream, the blurring of boundaries between states, is known as depersonalization and derealization. And it is significantly more common in neurodivergent people than most realize. The parallel universe I built as a child, the camera feeling, the vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life and sometimes recur across years, these are not signs of psychosis. They are signs of a brain that experiences the boundaries between inner and outer reality differently than most.

I was always too ashamed to speak about this. It felt too strange, too close to something I was afraid of being labeled as. But it is not hearing voices. It is not hallucinating. It is a brain that built extraordinary coping mechanisms in extraordinary circumstances, and then never quite dismantled them, because they were useful.

The Disappearing Act

Which brings me to dissociation — or as I prefer to call it, my emergency exit.

I can step away entirely and most people will never notice. Not in a dramatic way, not with any visible sign. I am simply there, and then I am not, while my body stays behind and does a passable impression of paying attention. I learned in a clinic that this is common in people with AuDHD, that the brain, when overwhelmed by sensory overload beyond a certain threshold, simply… steps out for a moment. Hits pause. Goes somewhere quieter.

The only time it becomes visible is what I now know to call a freeze response. My eyes go unfocused, I look through whoever is in front of me rather than at them, and I am simply gone. It’s the situation I’ve described in the beginning of this post. It tends to make people uncomfortable. It also, on more than one occasion, made people angry, particularly men who interpreted my vacant stare as aggression or a challenge and responded accordingly. Being shouted at for staring when you are not even present is a special kind of surreal experience.

What nobody ever stopped to consider was that I was not staring. I was coping.

300 Years Old and 30 at the Same Time

There is one more way that time works differently for me, and it is harder to explain than all the others.

I feel ancient and young simultaneously. When I turned 40 and caught my reflection and suddenly noticed I was aging, it was not the aging itself that unsettled me; I have always looked considerably younger than I am, and that has not changed. What unsettled me was the awareness of limitation. Of a world that looks at a woman who is, on paper, in her 40s or 50s, and makes decisions accordingly – about what she is capable of, what she should be offered, what chapter of life she must be in. From the inside, I have always been able to reinvent myself entirely, to start over, to become something new regardless of how many years had technically passed. Age never felt real to me in a linear way. It still doesn’t.

And yet. I am also acutely, painfully aware of time passing. When it is June, the year already feels almost over. Entire periods of my past feel genuinely inaccessible, not forgotten exactly, but sealed off, as if they happened to someone else in another timeline. Which, in a way, they did.

The Lightbulb

The last piece of this is perhaps the most AuDHD thing about me.

I do not evolve gradually. I do not inch forward through slow, incremental change. I try and try and try to shift a pattern, to understand something, to break through a wall I can feel but cannot see, and nothing happens. And then one day, without warning, a lightbulb turns on. The puzzle unfolds in my mind’s eye, complete and fully formed. I see it. All of it. And I cannot understand how I didn’t see it before.

Once something clicks, I do not forget it. I do not slip back. I simply become different, immediately and permanently, in a way that apparently unnerves people who were not expecting it. It is one of the reasons a clinic once declared me ready to leave ahead of schedule. Not because the work was easy, but because when it landed, it landed completely.

This is not patience or discipline. It is just how my brain processes things – in the dark, and then all at once, in the light.

What It All Means

I have spent a lot of time in this post describing things I have rarely or never said out loud. The parallel universe. The camera. The disappearing. The strange relationship with age and years and the passage of time.

What I want you to take from this, if you recognize any of it, is that none of it makes you broken. It makes you someone whose brain found extraordinary ways to survive an ordinary world that wasn’t built for it. The parallel universe was not madness. It was creativity in the service of survival. The camera was not delusion. It was accountability without external structure. The dissociation was not weakness. It was your nervous system doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

You built what you needed, with what you had, before anyone gave you a name for any of it.

That is not a disorder. That is resilience.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from being consistently misread by the people around you. From trying your hardest to connect, and watching it land wrong. From caring deeply, sometimes too deeply, and being told you are cold, arrogant, aggressive, or self-absorbed.

This is a story I know well. It is the story of most of my life.

“You always make everything about yourself”

One of the things I heard most often in relationships and friendships was that I made everything about me. Someone would share an experience, and I would immediately jump in: “Oh my God, that happened to me too!” or “I know exactly what you mean, once I…”

What I was trying to do was make them feel heard. Safe. Less alone in their experience. In my mind, sharing a similar story was the highest form of empathy, proof that I genuinely understood, that their experience resonated so deeply it triggered my own memory.

What they heard was: here she goes again.

It took me a long time to understand that for most people, empathy looks like silence and nodding, not enthusiastic parallel storytelling. And it took even longer to stop feeling hurt by that, because my intention was always the opposite of selfishness. I was relating. I just didn’t know that my way of relating looked, from the outside, like hijacking.

This is one of the cruelest paradoxes of AuDHD: I feel everything. Other people’s pain, joy, discomfort, excitement, I absorb it all like a sponge. And yet the very intensity of that feeling causes me to respond in ways that get misread as oblivious or egotistical.

Too Much, and Never Enough

I am animated. When I am excited, I get loud. When I am angry, I get louder. When I am passionate about something, I talk faster, my hands move, my whole body gets involved. I have been told I am aggressive, combative, threatening, intimidating, and half the time I didn’t even realize my volume had climbed.

I would walk away from conversations genuinely confused. Was I angry just now? I didn’t feel angry. I was passionate. I was engaged. I was, in my own internal experience, enthusiastic, and what landed on the other person was a wall of intensity they didn’t know how to handle.

So I learned to censor. To monitor my own volume in real time, to modulate my tone, to consciously soften edges that felt sharp to others but completely normal to me. It was exhausting. And it was yet another layer of masking – performing “calm” and “reasonable” while internally running at full speed.

At the same time, I somehow also managed to miss obvious signals. Hints. Subtext. The thing someone is really saying when they say something else. I can walk into a room and feel the tension before anyone has spoken a word, and yet completely miss that someone has been trying to tell me something for weeks because they never said it directly. If you don’t tell me clearly, there is a good chance I won’t pick it up. Not because I don’t care, but because my brain is wired for directness and tends to take things at face value.

So I was simultaneously too much and not enough. Too intense, too loud, too honest,  and also somehow oblivious to the obvious. Another name for me „Captain Obvioius.“

The “Defect” Problem

I have spent my entire life learning everything I could about whatever captured my attention. When I was finally diagnosed with AuDHD, I did what I always do: I researched obsessively. I read everything. I learned about rejection sensitive dysphoria, about sensory processing, about the specific ways autism and ADHD interact and contradict each other in the same brain.

So when I was at a clinic and the therapists kept referring to AuDHD as a defect, a mental disability, and framing it as a psychological illness, I could not stay quiet. They had never heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria. They were telling patients that something was fundamentally wrong with them.

I argued. I corrected. I explained. AuDHD is a neurotype, not a disease. It is a different operating system, not a broken one. A neurodivergent brain is not defective, it is merely differently wired. There is a significant difference, and the language we use to describe it matters enormously, especially to the people sitting in that room trying to make sense of their own minds.

To their credit, they listened. “We didn’t know that,” they said. And that was that.

But that reaction was the exception, not the rule. More often, at work, in friendships, in countless conversations where someone asked for my opinion or advice, the pattern looked very different. I would research deeply, form a well-grounded view, and share it honestly. And I would be told I was arrogant. Lecturing. Too serious. Sitting on a high horse. The cruelest version of this was when someone specifically asked for my input, didn’t like the answer, and then made me the problem for giving it.

I have a sense of humor, by the way. A very good one. I can sit in a corner laughing at something ridiculous I said or did, completely entertained by my own brain. It is just that my humor tends to be dry, or specific, or internally referenced in a way that not everyone follows. I spent years thinking something was wrong with my sense of humor too. Turns out, I was just funny in a room that wasn’t tuned to my frequency.

The Honesty Problem

I still don’t fully understand why honesty is treated as a character flaw.

I don’t understand the social contract that says you should soften the truth to the point of unrecognizability, or stay silent about something that matters, in order to keep the peace. I find dishonesty, even the polite, well-intentioned kind, genuinely confusing. Why say you’re fine when you’re not? Why agree when you disagree? Why not just say the thing?

The answer, I now understand intellectually, is that most people are managing a complex web of social relationships where directness can cause damage and ambiguity preserves harmony. I understand this. I just cannot always execute it.

What I struggle with most is knowing when it is safe to speak. I book a seat in the quiet section of the train specifically because I cannot manage the sensory overload of noise and chaos. When someone sits down next to me and proceeds to have a loud phone conversation, I am faced with an impossible choice: say something and risk being attacked for it, or say nothing and sit in sensory distress for the next few hours.

I have tried both. Neither works consistently. When I speak up calmly, politely, I am mostly still met with rudeness or hostility that I did not expect and cannot regulate my response to. When I say nothing, I spend the journey white-knuckling it through the noise, blood pressure rising and desperately trying to control my anxiety.

The result is that I often feel voiceless. Not because I have nothing to say, but because how I say it tends to land wrong, and when I am already emotionally activated by someone being rude or unkind, my ability to regulate my tone collapses entirely. I become the problem, even when I wasn’t the one who created it.

What I Wish People Understood

For most of my life, I was made to feel stupid. By teachers who called me lazy. By people who didn’t understand me and assumed the fault was mine. By systems that mistook my intensity for aggression and my honesty for arrogance. That feeling never fully went away, even after I had every reason to know better.

The truth is that being misunderstood this consistently and this chronically does something to a person. It makes you doubt yourself. It makes you wonder if the problem really is you, if you are too much, or not enough, or simply wired wrong.

What I know now is that I was never too much. I was just in the wrong rooms, with people who didn’t have the tools to understand me, and sometimes, frankly, didn’t have the desire to try.

There were always people who got it. Who found my honesty refreshing instead of offensive. Who laughed at the same things I did. Who didn’t need me to perform a quieter, softer, more palatable version of myself. They were, unfortunately, in the minority.

But they were enough to remind me that the problem was never me.

It was the frequency.