One of them tells of a life completely different from her own, where she was orphaned at 10 and ran away from her foster family at 15. “(I) dropped out of school, became a stripper, lived in my car, saved most of my money, learned to shoot a gun, and at 19 decided to enlist in the army,” she says. Then, once deployed, she meets a man who becomes her best friend, her lover and her business partner.

“After serving, we start a real estate development business together and use the money I earned when I was younger.” Things work out professionally but not romantically – because he wants kids and she doesn’t – and his partner ends up with someone else, but they continue to work together. “This character (his partner) that I developed has a name, a family history, I know what his face and body look like, he has been my companion for years,” says Ana. “When I gave up (maladaptive daydreaming), it was like losing a part of myself.”

Kyla Borcherds, who wrote a book on medicine called Extreme Imaginationhas been dreaming immersively for as long as she can remember, but believes her daydreaming became maladaptive when she was eight. “It has vacillated between immersive and inappropriate over the course of my life,” she says. “Looking back on it now, I can see that it depends on the level of stress I’m under.”

Now 52, ​​Borcherds has been imagining the same science fiction story for about 20 years and feels the same way as Ana. “I am deeply emotionally attached to my characters, and those emotions are real,” she says. “Also, because I created these characters, I feel very responsible for how others might perceive them. I guess you could say I’m very protective of them.

Although it was developed over two decades, she explains, the story itself is not linear. “The whole story evolves at once. Sometimes I go back and do the first scene again, if that’s what I feel like doing, or I can do the last scene, or I can go anywhere in the middle. So everything becomes more detailed over time. I still play with it.

For Borcherds and many other dreamers, the content of their daydreams is extremely personal and private, and most are reluctant to share details. According to Borcherds, it comes down to a mixture of shame, stigma and embarrassment, a protectiveness of both the characters and the plot itself, and the fear of feeling rejected if someone criticizes or judges her characters, with whom she feels emotionally connected.

She has a figure in her daydreams who is like a mentor. “I have a very deep respect for him and I would do just about anything to make him proud of me,” she says. “But there is a point in my plot where he makes choices in his personal life that are morally questionable, to put it mildly.” If I told his story and someone presented those choices as proof that they are not a good person, I would take that very personally and be very hurt.

The same goes for the plot: “For me, it is the most perfect and epic story ever written, but I also know that it is only perfect for me. No one else could love this story and these characters as much as I do, and so I don’t want to share it with anyone because I don’t want to be faced with the reality that others won’t find it as compelling. like me,” she said.

Immersive or inappropriate daydream

Daydreaming exists on a continuum, so it is difficult to analyze whether a person’s level of daydreaming is “normal” or not.

“The capacity for vivid, immersive daydreaming,” says Somer, is, for some, “an innate trait.” Some people simply have a “predisposition to fantasy or a very creative imagination.” There are variations in the way people’s minds work. Some people, for example, suffer from aphantasia and therefore cannot see their thoughts in images. Others may not be able to hear their internal monologue, called anauralia. Likewise, some of us dream immersively and others don’t. “Not everyone who engages in vivid or frequent daydreaming is having a maladaptive daydream,” says Somer. “The diagnostic criteria we have proposed focus on the distress and functional impairment caused by daydreaming, not just its presence or intensity.”

Immersive daydreaming becomes maladaptive when it invades a dreamer’s life. When Borcherds was younger, she was bullied and her daydreams became happier than her reality. At the time, she said, daydreaming prevented her from socializing, causing her to isolate herself. “I didn’t learn social skills naturally, like a lot of kids do, because I was socially isolated at a time when a lot of my peers were learning social interactions etc., and that’s something that I had to go through therapy later,” she says. But the most profound consequence, she says, was her ambition. “For a long time, I didn’t see the point in putting in much effort. to achieve something, because I could just dream about it, and while it will never be the same as having it for real, it’s not a bad substitute. , and it’s a lot less work,” she says. “I had no motivation to set goals and pursue them.”

Ana, on the other hand, has become dissatisfied with her life. “I felt like a ghost and I hated everything around me,” she says. “On the outside, I have a wonderful life…but on the inside, I really started to hate it all because it didn’t match the amazing experiences I was having in my head. »

His relationships and work began to suffer. “I often ignored texts, invitations and requests from friends and family until absolutely necessary and it was difficult to be fully present with my partner,” she says. “I run a business that my partner and I own together and we rely on me to be productive and operational all the time, (but) I was struggling to get through a five-hour day.”

Eli Somer’s 2022 research found that the content of a person’s MD may correlate with a certain unmet need, such as a desire for attention, love, or to escape life dissatisfaction. regard to his own life. Maladaptive daydreaming could then be seen as a form of escapism or emotional regulation.

However, another study, conducted among Italian adults during the Covid lockdown, found that MD also exacerbates feelings of depression and anxiety and contributes to loneliness. As in Dostoyevsky’s story, “loneliness… caresses the imagination.” The very things that cause people to dream in the first place – their loneliness, their sadness, their unmet needs – are reinforced by the act of daydreaming, and it forms a vicious, addictive cycle.