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The people who can’t stop daydreaming (for decades)

#1
C C Offline
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022...aydreaming

INTRO: Every day, Kyla* travels to a fictional universe with advanced space travel. It’s not real, of course – but an incredibly vivid daydream, centred on a protagonist with a detailed history. “It covers 79 years in the life of my main character,” she says. “I know how the whole thing plays out, and I can drop into it at whatever point I want to experience.”

Today, this habit is pure entertainment, which she limits to just an hour a day. “It’s like watching Netflix,” she says. “I just go into my head and enjoy it.” In the past, however, she had felt that her fantasies had become all-consuming. “There was a point where it was like an addiction.”

Karina Lopez tells a similar story. Her daydreams centre on conversations with different characters – some real, some imaginary. She’ll replay the same scenario, tweaking the details – a process she finds incredibly pleasurable. “As soon as I wake up, I want to daydream.”

At college, she would become so lost in these imaginings that she would forget to study for her exams or run errands. “I put off so many things – but in the moment it feels so good,” she says. On average, she now spends about three hours a day immersed in daydreams, but on bad days in the past, she could spend as many as six hours locked in her inner world.

Such reports are of increasing interest to psychologists, who have started to identify a subset of the population marked for their unusually immersive daydreams. At their best, these vivid and compulsive fantasies can be a source of pleasure and comfort, but they can also be a serious cause of procrastination and distraction, and can prevent people from maintaining their social connections, looking after their health or even eating regular meals.

With research revealing that as many as one in 40 people may experience these problems, it seems increasingly likely that “maladaptive daydreaming” will soon be formally recognised as a psychiatric disorder. So what is it? And how can it be treated? (MORE - details)

PAPER: https://link.springer.com/article/10.102...0597026919
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#2
stryder Offline
(Aug 29, 2022 03:55 AM)C C Wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022...aydreaming

INTRO: Every day, Kyla* travels to a fictional universe with advanced space travel. It’s not real, of course – but an incredibly vivid daydream, centred on a protagonist with a detailed history. “It covers 79 years in the life of my main character,” she says. “I know how the whole thing plays out, and I can drop into it at whatever point I want to experience.”

Today, this habit is pure entertainment, which she limits to just an hour a day. “It’s like watching Netflix,” she says. “I just go into my head and enjoy it.” In the past, however, she had felt that her fantasies had become all-consuming. “There was a point where it was like an addiction.”

Karina Lopez tells a similar story. Her daydreams centre on conversations with different characters – some real, some imaginary. She’ll replay the same scenario, tweaking the details – a process she finds incredibly pleasurable. “As soon as I wake up, I want to daydream.”

At college, she would become so lost in these imaginings that she would forget to study for her exams or run errands. “I put off so many things – but in the moment it feels so good,” she says. On average, she now spends about three hours a day immersed in daydreams, but on bad days in the past, she could spend as many as six hours locked in her inner world.

Such reports are of increasing interest to psychologists, who have started to identify a subset of the population marked for their unusually immersive daydreams. At their best, these vivid and compulsive fantasies can be a source of pleasure and comfort, but they can also be a serious cause of procrastination and distraction, and can prevent people from maintaining their social connections, looking after their health or even eating regular meals.

With research revealing that as many as one in 40 people may experience these problems, it seems increasingly likely that “maladaptive daydreaming” will soon be formally recognised as a psychiatric disorder. So what is it? And how can it be treated? (MORE - details)

PAPER: https://link.springer.com/article/10.102...0597026919

Points:
I'd say it's more of a compulsion than an addiction.

The actual reason "day dreaming" existing in this way is pre-cognition (Which is part of the reason it can be seen as an obsessive-compulsive condition).

For instance if you plan to go to the shop to buy some milk, you won't just think of a bottle of milk. you'll literally plan the entire trip.. what things you need to do before you leave your house, which method you choose to travel, what route to take, which shop to go to and even which shelf to approach.

Of course it can lead to anxiety (from further consideration), as you can have that all planned out in your head and get a flat tyre on your way there. That means you don't get the milk and you end up upset at both the tyre and the fact that you can't follow your alloted plan to the letter.

It's the same thing that drives peoples concerns of stagefright. The fear of being up on a stage, how it might pan out both good and bad, and how uneasy a person can feel (again anxiety) which can be solved by either bearing the brunt of actually getting up there and just dealing with it or just snagglepussing a "Exit stage Right!".

The problem with inventing a new term for a new condition, is they are already considering new "treatments" rather than therapies. I mean those that "daydream" at this level have a heightened cognative skill that just needs better management, but it would likely just become a bunch of print chalk pills with ludicrous prices being sold as a cure all from some big pharma firm.
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
That's amazing how people can use their imaginations in such elaborate and detailed ways. To just go into a world you have created for yourself and experience meaning at such a deep level! The closest I ever came to that was reading LOTR and C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy. I really felt myself part of those worlds as I read them. But they were nothing independent from the written text of the books. It was always the author's world that I was experiencing, though I embellished it with my own personal details.
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#4
stryder Offline
Just another point, a term for such people already kind of exists:

Visionaries (wikipedia.org)
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#5
confused2 Offline
I would guess that all (most?) fiction writers are 'there' in their fictional world. Recently while reading a book there were a few bits I thought an editor should have told the writer to change or leave out - I can imagine the writer refusing on the grounds of 'that is what happened'.
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