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Spinning Stories
My sensory issues made my life hard. Not being believed made it harder. Fortunately, I had my own way of dealing with things, and a series of drawings I did when I was five or six serves as an example.
The drawings told the story of a knight’s courageous quest. In the last scene, the knight stands before the king and queen, bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts. He has battled through a bramble hedge and crawled over broken glass to return a hero.
Looking back, I think I was that knight, and the king and queen were the parents I was trying so hard to please. I didn't understand why I struggled with doing what was expected of me—so I processed it through fantasy.
Story helped me makes sense of things. So I retreated into my own world.
I spent entire evenings scripting magical adventures so engaging I sometimes stayed up all night to continue them. Occasionally, I was able to program my dreams to continue my fantasies once I drifted off to sleep.
Fantasy wasn’t only a refuge, though—it was a bridge—and when I was very young, it actually helped connect me with others.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies. There were no computer games or entertainment streams. So we entertained ourselves with elaborate and dynamic games of pretend.
My ability to create interesting make-believe scenarios and missions for spies and cowboys and adventurers was appreciated. For a time, it even earned me a place in the neighborhood hierarchy.
Sometimes I based my “let’s pretend” ideas on books I was reading.
One such book was The Egypt Game.
This lovely book, which is still in print, tells the story of a group of children who pretend to be ancient Egyptians enacting rituals to the goddess Isis. I was captivated by the idea. I even managed to convince some of the neighborhood girls to participate in made up rituals in out subterranean furnace room.
While Priestess of Isis did not catch on, my interest in Egypt persisted. This was my first concrete autistic special interest, and I committed to it completely.
I worked my way through all the books on Egypt in our school library. I read and reread the Ancient Egypt section in our home encyclopedia. When a Life Magazine article on King Tutankhamun’s tomb came out in 1968, I stole the magazine from the living room coffee table and kept it under my bed so I could refer to it again and again.
I didn’t just read about Egypt, though. I read everything I could get my hands on. And I was lucky in that regard.
Books were always available to me. I read my mom’s paperbacks. Her Reader’s Digest Condensed books. My dad’s history books. Our encyclopedias.
I spent long hours at the school library. But while the library was wonderful, school itself was not.
I tried to do the right thing, but I always got it wrong.
And everyone noticed.
My timing was terrible. I was loud when I should have been quiet. I was bossy when cooperation was called for. I was hypersensitive when I should have taken things in stride.
I was terrible at sports. Outside on the playground, my allergies were so acute I could barely see whatever ball was coming my way, let alone catch it.
And it was a bit like that with everything.
I was continually out of sync.
My mother liked to tell people that I was an only child, without the social benefits of siblings, or that I was one of the youngest kids in the class. But the excuses didn’t work.
I was different. I liked peculiar things. I had no sense of what I should or shouldn’t say. I was bullied. My classmates didn't seem to like me, and by fifth grade many of my neighborhood friends had started to abandon me as well.
And I did not know why.
I did well on tests. I excelled at classwork. I knew I was as smart or smarter than most of the other children. And yet, in every way that mattered to me then, they were light years ahead of me.
It was confusing, but I took comfort in books and fantasy, and in my favorite TV show, the long-running paranormal soap opera Dark Shadows.
I found the world of Dark Shadows a hundred times more interesting than the world of suburban Michigan. I loved the dark, moody atmosphere of the Collinwood mansion, and the charismatic vampire, Barnabas Collins.
I liked to think I saw a bit of myself in the gentle Vicky Winters. But it was the mysterious and exotic witch, Angelique Bouchard, who captured my imagination.
Angelique appeared in many guises over the course of the show. In most she was vindictive and cruel but it wasn’t her personality that fascinated me. It was her power.
And so, thanks to Angelique, I developed an interest in witchcraft.
I started writing short fantasy stories. I bound my favorites into small Smyth-sewn booklets complete with real cloth-covered boards as we had learned to do as part of a school project. Most of my stories were fantasies and some of the protagonists were witches.
But I didn’t just want to write about witches or watch them on TV. I wanted to actually learn about them, and this called for research.
There wasn’t much information on the topic at the school library, so I found myself at the grown-up library, digging through actual history books.
The history I found was violent and demoralizing, but even at twelve, I knew it was important.
So I wrote my first term paper on the witch trials at Salem. This was the latest in what was already becoming a long line of mistakes.
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The Spirit Dream is a neurodivergent memoir about spirituality, creativity and the long road to becoming the person I was meant to be.
©2026 Barbara Graver. All rights reserved. This is an original creative work. Do not reproduce or redistribute without the written permission of the author.
Wonderful, Barbara. I am reporting this in hopes that more people will come to appreciate your rich writing.
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