Confessions of a Maladaptive Daydreamer

If you've ever been in a heated argument, odds are you've come up with a clever response only after several hours had passed. And maybe, in your mind's eye, maybe in the shower, you've imagined how things would have gone if you had thought of that response in-the-moment, rather than when it was already too late.

I mean, we've all been there, right? Finding ourselves embodied in a fictional hypothetical, with our emotions getting worked up as though it was actually happening.

Some people do this much more than others. For instance, like me. It's probably rather embarrassing for me to confess, but I've never been one to shy away from being candid on this blog.

Ever since I was a child and had nowhere physical to escape when my parents were arguing about money at three in the morning, or when I was getting scolded for drawing a variety of colours on the walls—the only place I could retreat was my own mind. I'd imagine alternative realities made of pillowforts for shelter and refuge. Where I could hide, and where things would be quiet and calm.

As I got older, these daydreams became more elaborate and specific instead of subsiding. They became primarily about other people and how I'd interact with them. During my walks home from school, I would find myself constructing hypothetical futures where I had repaired relationships I ruined, or finally said all the sentimental heartfelt things to someone I was too shy to say in reality. During restless nights of insomnia, I would craft the environments and the textures and the visuals—I'd imagine myself crashing events or hosting my own, inviting dozens of people only to care about one particular person attending à la The Great Gatsby.

I'm standing in the ramshackled doorway of a liminal apartment, walls the colour of dried sage. There's a girl I liked and never told, she has anonymous brunette bangs, and she's sitting at a lopsided kitchen table with a water ring left by somebody's glass. Of course I'd write her half of the dialogue. And then, I'd run the same three minutes over and over, changing the line that made her laugh, or frown. Until the cinematography and stagework all snapped into place.

Or maybe I'd construct a bookstore to host a reading when I get published. Folding chairs squeaking against linoleum as people shifted their weight, a friend from years back turns up unannounced in the last row. I'd deliver the same sentences of the introduction over and over, adjusting the joke, adjusting the pause. All long after I'd stopped consciously choosing to think about any of it at all.

Not Recognized

Clinical psychologist Eli Somer coined "maladaptive daydreaming" in 2002, after years spent researching trauma and dissociation at the University of Haifa, when he noticed a pattern in his patients that didn't fit existing diagnostic categories—people describing daydreams so vivid and immersive they were replacing human interaction rather than accompanying it. His original definition is daydreaming that's intensive and vivid enough to functionally substitute for real relationships, and interferes with school, work, or interpersonal life.

James Thurber's Walter Mitty narrates his way through hydroplane crashes and courtroom dramas to survive a forgettable errand-run of a day, a comparison used to explain maladaptive daydreaming to people who've never experienced it.

It's been two decades and maladaptive daydreaming itself exists in administrative limbo. There's a growing body of peer-reviewed research, an open-access 16-item screening scale with clinical cutoff scores, and an international research consortium. But it still isn't recognized by the DSM or ICD as a standalone disorder.

Somer's term found its an audience online, as the description spread through dedicated forums and support communities run by people who'd spent years assuming living in their own heads was rare, or shameful, or entirely their own invention. An anthropological account of these communities writes about members who pace for hours during a daydream, and those who need a specific song to drop back into the version of themselves that only exists inside a fantasy, and those who talk about the pull of it in language usually reserved for addiction.

The Internet did for this what it's done for a dozen other private, idiosyncratic-feeling experiences: turned it into a shared vocabulary.

Studies out of Hungary found that people who screen as maladaptive daydreamers report significantly more childhood traumatic experiences than typical daydreamers, and that there's a relationship with dissociation—and with identity confusion and a felt lack of control. But other researchers note that trauma isn't a necessary or sufficient cause on its own. Maladaptive daydreaming shows up more often as one risk factor among several, alongside social anxiety and attentional difficulties overlapping symptomatically with ADHD, and what the literature calls "pathological absorption," an elevated capacity to get lost inside an internal world at the cost of the external one.

Paracosms

That absorption trait is what separates maladaptive daydreaming from regular daydreaming. A long-running Oregon study on children who build sustained imaginary worlds called "paracosms," complete with their own geography and internal rules—found those kids test no differently from their peers on almost every measure, except unsurprisingly, they consistently score higher on storytelling creativity. Nothing to worry about, in other words. The difference between a paracosm and maladaptive daydreaming isn't about the intensity of imagnation, but whether the world you built stays a place you visit or becomes the place you live.

I like to think that there have been benefits to this coping mechanism. As though I've been keeping my mind's eye sharp through constant usage. I'm capable of juggling numerous things in my head at a time because I'm always living there. When I sit down to write, there's a dozen points I already have and I (usually) manage not to lose them.

In another way, it feels as though I've inadvertently created a schism within myself. The daydreamer version of me is a completely different mode of existence compared to how I act when I'm pulled out of my mind and into the real world, when I'm actually talking to others. I'm far more pragmatic and unsentimental, I acknowledge my shortcomings and flaws rather than cerebral orchestrate a non-existent future where I mend and repair everything those flaws deteriorate. I'll often find myself going to sleep yearning with paragraphs I'd want to message someone with, only to wake up and not feel that want at all.

The Escape

Escapism into fictional stories is certainly not unique to maladaptive daydreamers. It is near a default mode of existence for people. We love media, we love good stories on film, or television, or in books about others who have never existed, but are written well by others. And people are so moved by their experiences about the stories of others that they create their own fanwork, and fandom. It is an incredible, gratifying experience, and that's exactly why I began the transformative works archive fanfiction.lol. Fandom spaces get studied as coping mechanisms for stress and loneliness, operating through narrative transportation—where attention and emotion are so fully absorbed by a story that the reader feels carried inside it. Fanfiction is as a place where people work through identity and feeling inside a world they already trust.

But my daydreams are different—there is no separation, no understanding that the story eventually ends. I am, in a way, stuck in the thoughts in perpetuity. And the most interesting thing I've realized over the years is that this hasn't just been a shield and coping mechanism, but that I've come to enjoy it. When I'm able to totally forget my body and physical surroundings and the imaginative world I've conjured is so strong that everything else is forgotten, it's as enjoyable as any restful sleep can be.