Immersive and maladaptive daydreaming
So I was wondering if anyone else here is an immersive or maladaptive daydreamer.
If you've never heard of those terms, this site describes it pretty well:
[They are a] detailed, vivid and narrative form of daydreaming, featuring complex plots and a cast of characters (either imaginary or based on real people). Daydreams may focus on one scene for many minutes or hours at a time, and usually return to the same story in future daydreaming sessions, so that the plot evolves over weeks, months or years. Often, the topic of the daydream is unconnected to the daydreamer’s real life.
If it helps you get a clearer understanding, I personally like to describe it as never really outgrowing playing pretend. To this day I still call it "playing my game", and I use fictional worlds as a basis (which I then load with tons of original characters and lore of my own design).
The main difference between maladaptive daydreaming and immersive daydreaming is that with maladaptive, it gets in the way of life since you let it take precedence over life. One article I read when I first learned about the terms had someone describe it as an addiction to your own mind, which... Yeah, I think you can see why that's a challenge to overcome.
I personally think I'm more in the immersive category, with some maladaptive tendencies, but I think it's helped me overall more than harmed me. I'm an only child and was "the weird kid", so I spent a lot of time daydreaming as a kid. I credit it with why I'm able to relate to other people so well, and why my sense of self is so defined. I got to do all my self-exploration pretty directly inside the daydreams, and it let me explore a lot of scenarios I'd never encounter in real life. As a writer, I also use it sometimes to explore story ideas and concepts.
The downsides for me personally: I'm definitely able to "disconnect" from reality more easily than others, for better and worse. If I don't have time or space to play for an extended period of time, I can get pretty restless too. Also, music is both my greatest motivator and my bane. I sometimes spend more time trying to find a song to fit a scene's mood than actually daydreaming. I also learned that music can actually drain my energy after working at Goodwill one Christmas. My mom described the playlist as "dirges", which is the best word because those songs were all super slow (minus one high-energy Jingle Bells cover that was honestly jarring). I'd come home from work feeling exhausted.
What about you guys? Anyone else here an immersive or maladaptive daydreamer?
I think I have a case similar to yours - immersive daydreaming with maladaptive tendencies.
My daydreams often revolve around the most recent entertainment I've consumed: books, movies, TV shows, etc. I constantly find myself thinking about characters, scenarios, variations of those scenarios, and even changes to the plot.
The maladaptive aspect comes into play when two triggers are present: music and movement. When I'm in a car and listening to music, I can daydream for hours on end, sometimes completely unaware of my surroundings (not driving, obviously). However, I believe the core issue arises when I'm at home, listening to music while pacing back and forth in my room, lost in my daydreams. There have been instances where I've done this for hours straight, and that's when I realized how negatively it might be affecting me.
Currently, I'm trying to avoid falling into this habit, and it hasn't been too difficult. However, there are still days when I catch myself wandering around my room for half an hour, listening to music. I see it as a consequence of being a creative person, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.
Interestingly, when I'm engrossed in a rational thought process, such as those involving academic matters and logical thinking, I also tend to wander around my room, unaware of my surroundings. In fact, some of my best insights have occurred in this scenario. It seems my brain needs a bit of physical movement to function properly, like a hand crank.
Glad to meet someone else who hasn't had purely negative experiences with it! I learned about maladaptive daydreaming before immersive daydreaming, and I always felt a bit out of place seeing people discuss their struggles with it. I participated in a survey a while ago from someone on reddit, and they said I was the only one who'd reported mainly positive experiences with daydreaming.
I've definitely spent many hours daydreaming without meaning to, that's definitely the biggest challenge for me. I've always been kind of conscious of how I spend my time. I think it's gotten harder since we got our dog though, since she gets worked up and tries to follow me when I pace. Our previous two dogs gave me false hope that all dogs would learn to eventually ignore me. Previously I'd be able to just pace whenever the mood struck for short bursts, but now I have to do it in the basement, usually at night after everyone's in bed. So that's probably messed up my sleep schedule even further.
Like you said though, I don't think it necessarily has to be a bad thing. It really can help sort out thoughts and feelings. Exercise has always been linked to keeping your mind sharp anyway, so it makes sense it helps you think and get ideas/insight.
I used this as an escape from my life when I was kid, when my life was too scary or boring or I was trying not to be noticed. I wanted to write stories so I told people I was coming up with stories.
I still do it sometimes, but usually as I’m trying to fall asleep if there’s a character or situation I’m trying to work out. I still think I might write one down some day.
Your repsonse just highlights one of the reasons I like to talk about this topic. While daydreaming is beneficial for me, for a lot of people it's harmful in the ways you described. Knowing there's a term for it can help a lot in figuring out how to handle it. Just while trying to search for a good definition to use, I found multiple sites dedicated to overcoming maladaptive daydreaming. The site I linked seems to have a lot of posts and resources, and there are plenty of other sites too.
The tricky thing is it's still not well known and isn't yet officially recognized as a mental health disorder. It's a fairly recent discovery (got coined in 2002 according to Wikipedia), and research is pretty sparse. But there's been some progress. Just this year, turns out researchers published results of a treatment programme for the first time. It says that mindfulness training is a large part of it, so you may find that topic helpful to look into.
I have this problem right now!
I have many stories that I've made over time and have not written them down. Which is sad, because they get really interesting and crafted sometimes, and then I forgot most of it once I've moved on to a different story. I still have a vague understanding of what the previous story was about, but I'll remember the characters, setting, and general plot.
I've been doing this since I was a child, but I'm a full grown adult now. I'm not even a young adult.
While I enjoy making stories and I think of them as a mostly positive and controllable, there will be times in my life where they just happen and I can't stop them. It's really bad. I would waste days just being stuck daydreaming when I have work to do. But it's usually a sign that something's wrong in life.
I was at one of my jobs that I've been at for 5 years, and near the end of it, it kept happening at work. Good thing was I already told my boss I was going to quit. And after I quit, it stopped. I didn't hate my job. I liked my office and the people. I don't know.
The thing is, I thought I did a good job of hiding it at work. But many years later, while hanging out with my ex-colleague. The Walter Mitty movie had just come out, and he asked me if that's why I'm sometimes just staring at my PC.
Then life got very hard again with death and all. And it started again. It was so bad, I could be walking somewhere, and my brain would be daydreaming but I'll be on autopilot. Concentrating on conversations with people would be difficult because I would have to really focus. It went on for weeks or months at a time I think, and then it stopped.
Then I went on for the next few years, in a new job with a good handle on it. I might lapse once in a while, but it'll affect me for a day or two, and then I'll be back to normal.
But now I'm having a really terrible time in life. I've been dealing with physical medical issues and it's just been bad. And my brain is running off again and I can't stop it. And I have work to do! I tried listening to Audio books and Tv shows on the side while I was doing work so that It would keep me focused in reality. It helped for a while, but then my brain started tuning that out and day dreams came back regardless of the Audiobook playing.
I told my therapist about it and she suggested scheduling day dreaming sessions. But I told her it doesn't work that way. If it starts, it just doesn't stop. It's an addiction. I can't even let it begin. But then I came up with an idea to lock it away.
So I locked the different stories in a different rooms and made a giant tiger sit outside of it. But the tiger is a nice tiger. He's a nice bouncer that doesn't let me in and we talks things through and go for walks away from the rooms. Fight imagination with imagination!
It's been working so far, but now I'm just obsessively on this site, distracting myself from work and my brain still. Damn it. I need to get back to work.
I had a really bad childhood, and often slipped into daydreaming to escape. Music often triggers it for me - I’ll just completely zone out into a very elaborate fantasy, for hours. Definitely gets in the way of daily life unfortunately. It’s some nice escapism to be sure but its definitely not entirely healthy for me.
A lot of people develop it as a coping mechanism for bad home lives. If it's causing trouble I'd recommend searching maladaptive daydreaming on Google or other search engines. Proper research is limited, but there's a lot of websites and resources dedicated to overcoming it which can help. Turns out researchers published results of a treatment programmer this year, and apparently a large part of it centers around mindfulness training, so that could be a good starting point.
Bad childhood and escaped so much in my mind that it got in the way as an adult.
I'm not sure if this is it, but when I was a kid/teen I used to make up a story when I was in bed to sleep using the characters of some games. I remember it was mostly characters from Tobal N° 1 (a game for PS1).
But it was not just a story for that night, it was more like an endless story. Every night I would continue from where I stopped the night before.
It was mostly teen drama, romance and fight, but this is one of the things I remember fondly of that simpler times.