Have you ever daydreamed? Have you fought terrorists in an airport in London, gone on talk shows as a famous and entertaining celebrity, or joined the Quidditch team at Hogwarts? Most children have vivid imaginations, full of farms, daily life, and impossible creatures. Adults daydream too, 2,000 times a day by some estimates, generally about “normal” situations like going on vacation or winning the lottery. I, on the other hand, have maladaptive daydreaming.
Maladaptive daydreaming isn’t recognized as an official condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but after being documented by an Israeli Professor, Eliezer Somer, a proliferation of people online have gathered into support blogs and forums for this strange mental condition.
As its name suggests, maladaptive daydreaming is just plain daydreaming, often accompanied by repetitive movements like pacing or spinning for often four hours at a time. What could be so wrong with daydreaming? Sometimes triggered by trauma, this condition supplies endless vivid daydreams that slowly consume the victim’s life by giving them a false life that is perfectly safe and comfortable. While it has been sometimes linked to depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, not all maladaptive daydreamers have other mental health challenges.
It is important to note that maladaptive daydreaming is not psychosis such as what is seen in dissociative identity disorder or schizophrenia because the daydreamer has a clear distinction between fantasy and reality. Despite a tendency to speak their character’s dialogue or react to what happens in their daydreams, they know it’s not real. This knowledge can be hard for some maladaptive daydreamers, however, because they feel for their fictional characters almost as much as for actual friends and family.
These daydreams often follow certain characteristics. These include long, complicated storylines, multiple story worlds that sometimes use the same characters, stories borrowed from books, movies and TV shows, alter-ego characters that are idealized versions of the daydreamer themselves, violence, romance, adventure, and conflicts that represent where the daydreamer is in their own life mentally and emotionally.
Maladaptive daydreaming offers the gift of remarkable and powerful creativity, but it is a double-edged sword. Because of the addictive nature of these daydreams, people with the condition (who are primarily women) find themselves pushing away less interesting tasks in favor of daydreaming.
I’ve never been able to fall asleep easily, but it wasn’t until I learned about maladaptive daydreaming that I admitted that I can’t fall asleep because I am off flying in another world more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen before. I tend to require food often in reasonable quantity to keep from passing out or getting incredibly moody, but when I’m daydreaming in the late morning I will straight out forget to eat until hours after lunchtime.
A side effect I thankfully don’t have much experience with is bad grades from an otherwise clever person. Many maladaptive daydreamers can’t focus on reading or lectures, and can’t figure out how to study.
One of the worst parts of maladaptive daydreaming is that the daydreams can easily be seen as being more fulfilling than real life. Many, many people posting on Quora their experiences with maladaptive daydreaming stated that they felt like they were god when they were daydreaming. When you create the world, the people, even the hard things, it is exactly what you want. Everything is perfect. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges in daydreams, but the challenges are able to be overcome and are entertaining to fight.
Maladaptive daydreaming can destroy relationships. When you have an imaginary boyfriend whose worst trait is the fact that he happens to be a werewolf, your expectations are ridiculous. Normal people don’t say exactly the right thing at the right time, and don’t always agree on all the important things.
I’ve seen many sad things in my quest to learn about maladaptive daydreaming, but one of the worst was a post from a young girl who was terrified about the problems her daydreaming was going to cause, primarily how she was going to hide it in college, and how she was going to hide it from her future spouse and children. When you’re nowhere near twenty and you’re trying to figure out how to hide things from your currently nonexistent partner, something is deeply wrong.
Maladaptive daydreamers don’t just hide the condition; they hide themselves from the world. People are confusing, and people are hard. It’s much easier and more comfortable to stay behind your closed door and daydream. If they don’t have friends, they will simply invent them, and never seek out living, breathing ones.
There are many different sides of maladaptive daydreaming. As someone posted online, “There’s so much that these people could be capable to do if their daydreaming wasn’t holding them back. The same thing that gave them an outlet for their creativity is the same thing that’s robbing them from sharing it with the world.” I can’t say it much better than that.
While I daydream for hours, purposefully triggering the stories by listening to music, and while I’ve walked in circles so much that I ached by the end of the day, and while I quickly wear holes in all my socks, it could be much worse. I have supportive friends and family that pull me out and give me a reason to exist in the real world.
An anonymous maladaptive daydreamer that was interviewed shared their story of daydreaming and how it destroyed their life. They say daydreaming is as addictive as any drug, and it’s a drug that we have constant access to. Their daydreaming was so consuming that they couldn’t pass their driving test, or focus enough to read their college textbooks until they reigned it in.
Sometimes my maladaptive daydreaming pulls me away from life if I don’t get out of the house enough. When I watched the Harry Potter movies with a friend, after at least half of the movies, I went off by myself, away from my friend and family, to solidify how the stories fit in with my saga.
Maladaptive daydreaming has helped me process hard things. I once read an awful article about children overheating to death in cars. I was so horrified that I immediately put one of my characters into a parking lot, and as she was walking by one of the cars she saw a little boy overheating in his car seat. By the end of the story, she was covered with blood and had punched a guy twice, but she had saved the child.
I wouldn’t give up maladaptive daydreaming entirely even if I could, but I need friends to hold me accountable and I need to try to reign in the time-consuming habits. This is how I created my saga, this is how I have tied myself to fanfiction, and this is the monster that threatens to devour my dreams.
There's not a particularly happy ending to this story, other than encouragement to focus on the positives of challenges you face, even when they feel endless.