An alcoholic can run out of booze or money. You can't run out of mind
August 25, 2020 7:17 PM   Subscribe

One day, when she was five years old, Daya Bharj told her brother she didn’t want to play with him any more. She wanted to play with her imagination. Daya lay down on the sofa in her family's living room and stared at the ceiling. She imagined a little boy, about her own age, running through a field. He came across an airplane that had crash-landed, then climbed inside and sat in one of the cockpit seats....Thirteen years on, the daydream is still going.

Any chance I had, I’d go and lie down or I’d just get sucked into it, and it was so hard to turn off. It’s like you’ve always got a tailor-made fantasy, soap opera, action film, whatever you want, playing in your head all the time. An alcoholic can run out of booze and money, but you don’t run out of mind. You can’t just tell yourself to stop thinking.
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Maladaptive daydreaming is a psychiatric condition. It....causes intense daydreaming that distracts a person from their real life....This disorder is not part of the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). It doesn’t have any official treatment. But some experts say it is a real disorder that can have real effects on a person’s daily life.
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Previously
posted by If only I had a penguin... (41 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well fuck. Another thing to get my kid evaluated for?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:22 PM on August 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


i mean i feel super basic saying this but uh it sounds better than tv. possibly better than metafilter, cause like metafilter the chief real-world value it has is as writing practice.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:23 PM on August 25, 2020 [7 favorites]


like midway through the piece it talks about how online support groups often become enabling and i understand that that can be a bad thing here in this fallen world where toiling for the man is deemed necessary for everyone but the children of the rich but oh boy i would have the hardest time not enabling the hell out of that

like shoot inventing stories all day what a terrible thing for a human to do what a bad thing it is not at all precisely the thing our brains are best suited for it’s in no way the most worthwhile part of human existence, no sirree bob
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:27 PM on August 25, 2020 [22 favorites]


13 years... with the same main character?!? wow

Today, there are almost 200,000 Google results for the search term “maladaptive daydreaming”.

Spiders Gambol, who lives in cave & searchs over 10,000x each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:28 PM on August 25, 2020 [13 favorites]


I see a lot of my high school years in this. Not as bad, perhaps, but certainly an ongoing world that I would retreat to instead of trying to be friends with people who didn't really like me anyway. Now I almost wish I had that power of mental concentration -- instead I play stupid games on my phone and flip back and forth to facebook. It is ... not an improvement.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:42 PM on August 25, 2020 [18 favorites]


Uh, this feels weird because it's very close to my own life story, which I eventually turned into a book, which is coming out in 2021 from HarperCollins. Right down to the Peter Pan themes, the bondage, the queering. Except you wouldn't know it's about me, because it's all couched in metaphor, which is how we deal with our trauma. Because we're writers.

Kid is going to be okay. I know because I lived it.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:53 PM on August 25, 2020 [48 favorites]


> Now I almost wish I had that power of mental concentration -- instead I play stupid games on my phone and flip back and forth to facebook. It is ... not an improvement.

i think possibly the useful frame is to approach this as if one did not have a preëstablished notion of what does or does not count as daydreaming. like what’s the criterion by which we define the actions of the subject/protagonist of this article as definitely daydreaming and the use of facebook on the one hand and phone games on the other as not daydreaming?

this is not a rhetorical question like i believe there is an epistemological puzzle here and one’s solutions to the puzzle may shed light on the puzzle-solver’s value system
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:27 PM on August 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


Wow, so glad to know I’m not the only one who has had a consistent day dream since I was a child. I’m going on over 20 years now.
posted by gucci mane at 8:55 PM on August 25, 2020 [5 favorites]


i kind of want to be like “spill!” re: everyone’s 20 year daydreams but also probably metafilter isn’t the best venue for that (harpercollins is the best venue for that?)
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:31 PM on August 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


There's a “spill!” thread here.
posted by Phssthpok at 10:05 PM on August 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


I did this in my teens, felt very weird about it but would sometimes spend hours in bed on weekend mornings or walking around my neighborhood telling myself stories about my exciting adventures as an adult far, far from here. I rebooted the story several times over the years, sometimes starting from scratch, other times starting from a nice point in a previous telling. I eventually just grew out of the habit in my twenties - became less and less into it, came to feel like I was forcing it, and finally just lost the urge entirely the first time I got pregnant.

I still like writing long fiction, but I don't think it scratches quite the same itch. The joy of it was mostly just imagining a world where I could be someone else with a different life, more freedom, more excitement. It felt very self-indulgent and escapist, even at the time. I wasn't writing it for someone else to read, I didn't have something I wanted to communicate. The whole fun of it was that I wasn't communicating with anyone but the people in my head.

For what it's worth: I got married, several times over the years, once as a beard for a gay man in a time when it wasn't legal where we lived. I lost a wife of decades to what I only remember as some sort of very tragic wasting disease (I actually cried IRL about this) and in my grief founded a convent. I developed a method by which anyone could learn telepathy with another individual. Got addicted to cigarettes. Played guitar in a band. Gave birth to twins with eldritch powers. Moved to the Welsh countryside and built a house with my own two hands. Learned to play the hammered dulcimer.
posted by potrzebie at 10:27 PM on August 25, 2020 [18 favorites]


Yeah, this was me in my teens. I kind of wish it hadn’t stopped. I miss that world.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:14 PM on August 25, 2020 [4 favorites]


Some of my school reports, especially early teens, had, 'Nigel spends a lot of time dreaming out the window' , or words to that effect. Forty years later I still find it a good time investment.
posted by unearthed at 11:19 PM on August 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yeah, this was me in my teens. I kind of wish it hadn’t stopped. I miss that world.

It's still there. It's been waiting for you.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 11:19 PM on August 25, 2020 [11 favorites]


It's good to have an imagination when the people world is boring or busy or ignorant as fuck. On the couch, in a bed, in a book (it's just splotches on a page, ALL the rest is you), in a long, long piece of music that tells you about places you can't go.

The outdoors isn't ever boring or ignorant, but it's not always available or it's in a mood. You could lose yourself in it. Oh noes!

People who've lost touch with their feelings like to worry about how to fix other people a whole lot. They tend to avoid mirrors and talk a lot ... but only to each other.
posted by Twang at 11:54 PM on August 25, 2020


I have missed countless buses daydreaming, but not within one consistent ongoing story. Usually it’s just rewriting old arguments. Maladaptive, for sure.

In my sleepdreams, however, I keep looking for the rest of the books in some kind of epic fantasy series whose name escapes me. Dreams years apart, but these sprawling tomes with some kind of space dragons on the covers, and far-reaching discussions of moral philosophy inside, keep showing up, like the author is still writing in there while I’m awake.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 12:06 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Maybe it's our society that is the maladaptive one, and these people have simply found an internal (non-pharmaceutical, non-profit-making) way to cope?
posted by Thorzdad at 2:53 AM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]


It's still there. It's been waiting for you.

Hoggle?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:26 AM on August 26, 2020 [15 favorites]


Well, this is my whole life. Never knew it was a bad thing (though I always made sure i was alone before i had conversations/play acted scenes aloud after i was, maybe, ten). Since childhood, I’ve had maybe ten or fifteen of these storylines. Usually 4-6 are going on at the same time. Some the stories are interconnected, most aren’t , because imaginary worlds have different rules, especially when they cross genres.

Sometimes these stories become or inspire written fiction/plays. Sometimes (often) they are just too big to wrangle. Most of the big ones are still there and I still tune in, like switching .channels in tv. Some of the stories are still developing; others are kind of in re-runs so I really just tune in for my favorite scenes/characters every now and then.

The thing in the article about the songs is true. Probaby 50% of my favorite songs are hopelessly bound up with imaginary characters snd plot lines. And it’s weird because even my closest friends and family will never know that what I’m hearing when a certain trademark song plays is not something anout my own life, but a big moment on the soundtrack from an entirely imaginary character’s epic story.

I used to feel very bad that my life was nothing at all like the ones playing out in my head and that i was nothing like the protagonists( a vicious, but poetic gender-bending revolutionary turned pirate captain, for example) and i did not have their bravery or their beauty or their adventures or their sex lives. But there’s some consolation in authorship. They can do everything but rewrite their own stories. Only I can do that. And while i’m okay at first drafts, I’m a real pro at revisions.
posted by thivaia at 5:27 AM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]


I'm 56 and I still do this. I have had dozens of story lines though, and I run through them, rewriting them, until I get tired of them and latch onto something else. They definitely sometimes interfere with my job and sometimes I drift off during a conversation, which is not good because I have a family who like to talk to me. It's not bad enough to cause any serious issues (at least not so far) but I feel really relieved right now because I thought I was the only person who daydreamed that much.

Personally, I think it's gotten worse recently, and I think it's because I'm stuck either at home or in my little office all the time because of Covid. I have a lot of time to daydream these days.
posted by ceejaytee at 5:52 AM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]


I have always had a handful of these but I only use them to fall asleep. I am one of those people who takes half an hour to fall asleep on a good day, and I HAVE to point my brain at something unrelated to the rest of my life in order to achieve sleep.
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:58 AM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]


I have always had a handful of these but I only use them to fall asleep.

I created the protagonist of my bedtime story when I was in 6th grade. In 1990.
posted by Ruki at 7:21 AM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


What a silly thing to try and frame as a mental disorder.
posted by nzero at 7:44 AM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Seconding the comment above about profit. How many hours a day do people spend watching Netflix or starting at their phone or whatever?
posted by nzero at 7:46 AM on August 26, 2020


I mean, especially this year, the world sucks. Daydream if it helps you, kids.

When I was 10 I stopped doing my homework and it freaked my parents out. I went to the school counselor and I remember her asking me about my daydreams and how I could maybe use them to imagine doing school work. But the thing is, though I had indeed done a lot of daydreaming, what I was really going through was a depressive episode.

I didn't know that till years later when I had one as an adult and got diagnosed.

I still add chapters to an ongoing story to help myself sleep, but if I'm struggling to focus or cope with anxiety I know that's a different thing.
posted by emjaybee at 8:14 AM on August 26, 2020


I have always had a handful of these but I only use them to fall asleep. I am one of those people who takes half an hour to fall asleep on a good day, and I HAVE to point my brain at something unrelated to the rest of my life in order to achieve sleep.

Yeah likewise, I'm a slow sleeper and I run stories in my head to fall asleep. Definitely have a bunch of recurring ones and most of my novel drafts are based on various of them.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:41 AM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


The problem with maladaptive daydreaming is not the daydreaming, but the life that offers nothing better than the daydreaming, or nothing that fulfills the same urges. I speak as someone who has had a serious problem. It's not gone, either; it's just less severe than it was.

My daydreams never involve me. Even as a child, they rarely did. I soon came to understand that I was not the stuff of legends, or even everyday dramas. I invented fantasy worlds that I retain a good memory of to this day. Some of them provided a basis for novels and short stories -- one was even published -- but a lot of it has had to be put aside or severely reworked because of cultural appropriation and inadvertent racism. Other bits of it were superseded by popular culture; Game of Thrones "stole" an important pair of characters, although of course it did not, because convergent evolution applies to fiction too. And much of it was just not that original or interesting.

I am lucky that I had a family that encouraged storytelling and made me see daydreams as an important part of a future career. I am not okay, of course, nor has it been a successful career, but to be left alone with the world as it is would be worse.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:53 AM on August 26, 2020 [11 favorites]


The Coronation Of Mr. Thomas Shap

It was the occupation of Mr. Thomas Shap to persuade customers that the goods were genuine and of an excellent quality, and that as regards the price their unspoken will was consulted. And in order to carry on this occupation he went by train very early every morning some few miles nearer to the City from the suburb in which he slept. This was the use to which he put his life.

From the moment when he first perceived (not as one reads a thing in a book, but as truths are revealed to one's instinct) the very beastliness of his occupation, and of the house that he slept in, its shape, make and pretensions, and even of the clothes that he wore; from that moment he withdrew his dreams from it, his fancies, his ambitions, everything in fact except that ponderable Mr. Shap that dressed in a frock-coat, bought tickets and handled money and could in turn be handled by the statistician. The priest's share in Mr. Shap, the share of the poet, never caught the early train to the City at all.

He used to take little flights of fancy at first, dwelt all day in his dreamy way on fields and rivers lying in the sunlight where it strikes the world more brilliantly further South. And then he began to imagine butterflies there; after that, silken people and the temples they built to their gods.

...
Written in 1912 by Lord Dunsany, and as problematic as you'd expect a story from 1912 to be, but it addresses the subject at hand rather poetically.
posted by MrVisible at 10:37 AM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


This wasn’t just normal daydreaming. Aside from the sheer amount of time they spent doing it, the patients found it difficult to control. It was adversely affecting their work, studies or social life.

That's an important piece of this. We shouldn't be dismissive of it as "better than TV" or "well, work is overrated," if it's actually a problem for someone. It seems that for some people it might be more like intrusive thoughts.

But if it's something that's in your control, and you enjoy it, and you can still do the other things you need and want to do - great!
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:11 AM on August 26, 2020 [11 favorites]


Any chance I had, I’d go and lie down or I’d just get sucked into it, and it was so hard to turn off.

Daydreaming isn't a problem. It's a maladaptation when the fantasizing is compulsive or inescapable. My lifelong maladaptive daydreaming is a trauma response, a creative well, a refuge, and (as I learned a few years ago) a part of having inattentive-type ADHD. It's self-indulgence and self-flagellation, and it's often involuntary. And I can't tell myself stories at bedtime, on purpose, because those stories are even more vivid and engrossing. When maladaptive daydreaming ramps up on its own (especially as I'm trying to complete a task requiring full attention, or I'm too tired to have anything else to distract me), and my mind starts wandering through story #287, it's real inconvenient. I'm never bored, but sometimes I'm frustrated.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:22 PM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


Oh my goodness, there are SO MANY of us?

Current story is 15+ years old, and I feel very much that I use it for emotional self regulation. (I change the details around depending on whether I'm anxious or whatnot).

I've done this my entire life and I remember doing this when I was 5 years old and it was an intensely private power fantasy.
posted by Omnomnom at 12:42 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


My whole life is a daydream about what I'm going to accomplish tomorrow.
posted by Wetterschneider at 4:21 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


My daydreams never involve me. Even as a child, they rarely did. I soon came to understand that I was not the stuff of legends, or even everyday dramas. I invented fantasy worlds that I retain a good memory of to this day. Some of them provided a basis for novels and short stories -- one was even published -- but a lot of it has had to be put aside or severely reworked because of cultural appropriation and inadvertent racism. Other bits of it were superseded by popular culture; Game of Thrones "stole" an important pair of characters, although of course it did not, because convergent evolution applies to fiction too. And much of it was just not that original or interesting.

Yep. Yep yep yep.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:16 PM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


I’m 64. I’ve been doing something like this since I was 11 or so. My stories, as I call them, never involve me. They usually help me get to sleep, and are certainly not maladaptive. I’ve had a dozen or so storylines over the years, involving a few variations on the same characters. Some are based on stories I’m trying to write, some become stories I’m trying to write.

I really had no idea I wasn’t the only one.
posted by lhauser at 6:09 PM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


Yeah I do this a good bit. Not from childhood, but from a good bit later. Some for going to sleep. Some are just replaying some memorable real dreams. Some are glorified What If? about paths not chosen or just missed because of some misconception that was learned just a bit too late.

Some of them can be quite annoying in their appeal. At least for a while, they usually eventually finish up like I've run out of new ideas and everything's already been done.

I keep track of a sort of space (think guided meditation) that's sorta like TARDIS in that it changes over time but has the same general functionality (and even previous generations are still there somewhere). There I keep a book that done or annoying daydreams/stories get put into. That's their place, never gone, but put away for at least a while. They occasionally sneak out anyway, wanting to play for a while, but back in the book they eventually go.

I was sorta thinking about an Ask on this particular thing. I've had a doozy rolling around for a couple of weeks now. Good to know that there is a maladaptive possibility but also that so many other people sorta do the same sort of thing. I sorta figured that writers had to sit around and dream up stuff in some slightly obsessive way at least until it was done.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:41 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


I feel obligated to drop this link here...
posted by WaterAndPixels at 10:27 PM on August 26, 2020


>> This wasn’t just normal daydreaming. Aside from the sheer amount of time they spent doing it, the patients found it difficult to control. It was adversely affecting their work, studies or social life.

> That's an important piece of this. We shouldn't be dismissive of it as "better than TV" or "well, work is overrated," if it's actually a problem for someone. It seems that for some people it might be more like intrusive thoughts.

But if it's something that's in your control, and you enjoy it, and you can still do the other things you need and want to do - great!


though also: i'm not kidding upthread about how it's useful, when analyzing this situation, to willfully forget our established categories for what counts as daydreaming and what doesn't count as daydreaming. when i try this exercise — your mileage may vary — i have trouble distinguishing "maladaptive daydreaming" from other forms of potentially life-impacting behavior. gaming, television, novel-reading, novel-writing, and pseudonymous participation in online communities can (and often do) play the same trauma-response role.

if i had to take a first stab at identifying the difference between television watching (or novel reading) and daydreaming, i'd start by focusing on how television at first appears to be a more social activity than daydreaming: you're not just thinking up experiences by yourself, but are instead participating in society by taking in experiences crafted by others. however, the nature of this sociality is basically parasocial — it's a one-way transmission from producer to consumer that leaves the viewer/reader feeling much closer to the producer than they actually are. if one is optimistic about our media culture, one could say that consuming the media produced by others is valuable because it inculcates the viewer in the preferred behaviors and norms of broader society. this optimistic view seems untenable, given ::gestures broadly toward all of the 2020 going on:: the nature of the specific behaviors and norms that our media inculcate.

i used the tv analogy here very deliberately indeed. and i'm not saying that mandatory work for pay is overrated, i am saying that mandatory work for pay is a vast well of trauma. moreover, the "self-indulgent" labor of daydreaming is more valuable and more important than the allegedly prosocial things we do in our focused, non-daydreamy lives.

my forms of compulsive daydreaming differ somewhat from the compulsive daydreaming discussed in this article, but only somewhat. i get lost in self-generated stories — to the point where it eats real deep into my time for work-for-pay and even for conventionally valuable social behavior — but i'm less about narrative and more about sounds and sentence structure, primarily about arranging words just right rather than telling stories with those words.

my metafilter behavior is, frankly, a symptom of my form of compulsive daydreaming, and as you can tell my metafilter behavior eats up a lot of my time.

> Daydreaming isn't a problem. It's a maladaptation when the fantasizing is compulsive or inescapable. My lifelong maladaptive daydreaming is a trauma response, a creative well, a refuge, and (as I learned a few years ago) a part of having inattentive-type ADHD. It's self-indulgence and self-flagellation, and it's often involuntary. And I can't tell myself stories at bedtime, on purpose, because those stories are even more vivid and engrossing.

anyway, i feel very 1970s saying all of this, like i'm felix guattari or something, but nevertheless i am compelled to argue that diving — carefully, thoughtfully — into this symptom is perhaps the best way to "treat" it, and that the way to prevent self-flagellation is to love this symptom and hate the system that prevents us from living in daydreams.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 6:39 AM on August 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


semi-relatedly, i recall reading some time ago — correct me if this isn't a real thing but instead something nice-sounding that i've pulled from daydreams — that the writer banana yoshimoto gets most of her stories from dreams, and spends much much much more time sleeping than is conventional.

in a world where the wolves come if we stop working for pay, yoshimoto can only get away with this because the stories she pulls out of sleep sell. not all of us can spend our time in the dream cinema like she does, because not all of us can write things that sell. so we must, for most of our short time, leave dreams (both daydreams and nightdreams) and indulge in toil. but the maladaptation isn't in us, it's in the world, and instead of flagellating ourselves about our syndrome we should get angry at the hateful world.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 6:47 AM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


Hey there, Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon. I'm glad that the behavior described in the articles is not your own experience, and that you're getting a lot of mileage out of analyzing daydreaming versus getting lost in habitual media consumption, and examining recreational activities as performed within the limits of a capitalist society, and so on.

For anyone struggling with the compulsive and intrusive elements of maladaptive daydreaming, I want to add that my own cognitive behavioral therapy with licensed practitioners tends to emphasize noticing when the fantasizing is underway, and consciously choosing to do something else instead. Having a short list of acceptable alternatives at the ready helps stem decision paralysis. (As I wrote above, I can't always accomplish the switch-over. (My value system is chugging along okay, though.))
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:30 PM on August 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


Is this really that uncommon? I've been running through fantasies as I fall asleep for at least four decades now, some alt-histories (mostly about introducing anachronistic technologies to ancient civilizations), some pure fantasies with magic and so on, some futuristic projections based (loosely if I'm honest) on current technologies.

Its a way to fall asleep without dwelling on my own failings, the horrors of the world around me, or the terrors of the future engendered by reading the daily news and projecting forward a few years. YMMV.
posted by Blackanvil at 7:46 PM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I don’t think the daydreaming itself is uncommon; the unusual part is the amount of time and energy spent doing it.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:25 AM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


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