Maladaptive Dreams Meta Essay

Maladaptive Daydreaming, Intrusive Daydreaming, Creativity, RPF, and Fantasy

I started maladaptive daydreaming at an early age to deal with the trauma of my existence. Most of my relationships have involved abuse and trauma for all of my 58 years. Therefore, without conscious thought or knowledge, I turned to daydreaming for hours on end.

"Maladaptive Daydreaming," which was identified by Eliezer Somer at the University of Haifa in Israel, is not a condition recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), according to Healthline. It is characterized by the following symptoms:

extremely vivid daydreams with their own characters, settings, plots, and other detailed, story-like features

daydreams triggered by real-life events

difficulty completing everyday tasks

difficulty sleeping at night

an overwhelming desire to continue daydreaming

performing repetitive movements while daydreaming

making facial expressions while daydreaming

whispering and talking while daydreaming

daydreaming for lengthy periods (many minutes to hours)

It's not considered a psychosis in which people cannot differentiate fantasy from reality, like schizophrenia. People who daydream this way fully recognize that they are daydreaming.

"Maladaptive" suggests it's a bad thing to daydream like this, but it is truly the only way I managed to survive. Daydreaming takes someone out of the present and into a fantasy world where the person can control events that are happening to them. When I was little, my daydreams were centered on acting out scenes with dolls. I remember staging shows starring my dolls-with them performing songs and scenes from TV shows. I did the same with my friends. We did a lot of pretending, as children do. When night fell and I lay in bed, the stories usually continued. I don't remember a time when I didn't have stories running like a film reel inside my brain.

I didn't think to write them down. I wrote poetry instead. I played with words. I wrote journals sometimes but I didn't want to tell the story of my own life. I didn't want to live in it anyway.

So I created the Fantasy Man.

I was probably 9 or 10 years old, maybe, or possibly younger, when I created the first one. I read something in a magazine, a Real Person Fiction (RPF) story, basically, about a movie star and a character. I don't remember the title, but it was a story about having a "trial marriage" with a celebrity. I had no idea what a trial marriage was-didn't know then and don't know now. Yet, the story remained in my memory-it had hand-drawn pictures and everything. It was an RPF, for sure, and I'm pretty convinced it was Reader X, too. After reading that selection in whatever teen magazine it was published in, I never looked back. Trial marriage, all the time, every day, every hour I could sneak it in, complete with misinformed sexual acts. I had no idea how fucking worked, so I made it up. (Making shit up has served me well in writing.)

After the RPF Trial Marriage thing, I moved on from Fantasy Man Version 1 into yet another celebrity crush. What's interesting about the Fantasy Men was that I couldn't tell who it was going to be or why I became attached to that individual. It was random. But once it hit, I was totally there. Always the running daydream storyline… Maladaptive daydreaming-not wanting to live in my own life.

Back in the day, I had to use the library to find information about the current Fantasy Man. I remember one time not being able to stop myself from defacing a library book. I neatly cut a page out when I found a photo I couldn't live without. I haunted bookstores looking for magazines with pictures and asked to buy them. I hoarded photos and read articles. If the internet had been around, I would have searched for hours.

Huh, I do that now.

I became an expert on Fantasy Man, if he was famous. I watched and read everything about him and noted all the details and stored them up inside my head. I didn't need to write any of it down. Still don't. Go ahead, ask me anything.

If Fantasy Man was going to be on TV, I would watch it. Those days, there were no VCRs, and I often recorded the audio of the TV show on a tape recorder (not a mini-one, but one that was the size of a loaf of bread). I was lucky that my mom owned a tape recorder and that she let me record on blank cassettes, which was considered fancy technology then. After recording, I wore out the tapes listening to them over and over.

With each iteration of the Fantasy Man, I realized that the story I told was one of recognition, of love, of acceptance, of admiration, of control. They were soothing fantasies where the Fantasy Man thought my character was the best person ever and there wasn't any conflict. Just admiration.

I say "my character" because now that I think about it, the original people in these daydreams were not me. They were characters. It's a multilayered, complicated thing that needs to be peeled away, bit by bit: there's me who writes this essay (hi!), "real me" in my daydreams, "I" who is a totally different person but uses the idea of "I" to be intertwined deeper in the fantasy, and "she," another character altogether who I began to evolve as a child.

See Figure below for the breakdown:

Me who writes the essay

"Real Me" in my current daydreams, a version of Me who writes the essay

"I," who is a character with little resemblance to Me who writes the essay.

"She," an early character in daydreams

I can't quite remember how the daydreams used to work when I was young. I believe I inhabited a character as "she," at first. After a while, my daydreams starred a different person, but, at a certain point, I daydreamed as "I," rather than "she." That fulfilled my daydream desires better than "she," but it was a little freaky at first. The daydreams had to be very different from my reality. How was "I" to meet and interact with the Fantasy Man if "I" was a kid or a teenager? Therefore, the earlier character, "she," had been everything I was not: grown, self-actualized, fully-realized. Later, I was able to slip into an "I" as long as the name was different and "I" was not really me. My own self could not be part of the fantasy without it breaking down-and that's close to being true today as well. I use a different version of my name to represent "Real Me."

Then I started writing stories, here and there, now and then. My poetry writing was always ascendent, but I started writing poetry about myself as well as "she." Therefore, in my head, the daydreams could be about a version of "me" as well. I distinctly remember thinking about a scenario in real life that would have allowed a version of "me" to meet the Fantasy Man. I included real people in the daydream-my neighbors whom I babysat for. Once I did that, I saw how the daydream, which I ended up writing down as a story, could include the "real me"-or what stood for the "real me" inside a daydream. Which wasn't the "real me" at all. How confusing. How many versions of "me" exist? Turns out, quite a few.

I can't pinpoint the moment that I switched over to a version of "me" that was truer to my life. But it happened and the change was so fulfilling that I felt 100 percent captivated by it. I never wanted to leave this kind of daydream; I never wanted to live in the real world. Why? Why should I when I get everything I need inside the bubble of daydreaming?

The internet was still not much of a thing back then, and I always needed more and more information, photos, stimulation for the stories in my head. I tried to keep the obsessions away from my real relationships with varying degrees of success; I hid photos and collections away and pretended I wasn't jonesing for the latest tidbit of news. (I don't even know why I'm writing in past tense as if this doesn't still go on.) I did everything I could to learn about the Fantasy Man of the moment, even though, as with all of them, they had real lives that had nothing to do with me. I never deluded myself that I could run off with any of them. I never mixed up the reality with the deeply fulfilling stories I told myself inside my head. Those were enough. However, sometimes I'd get bored with the same stories over and over. I needed inspiration-fodder, if you will-to make the stories new, exciting, and ever more fulfilling. I needed details about the lives, habits, interests of Fantasy Man-everything I could learn. I needed photos to see what kind of activities they were into, how they held themselves, who they hung out with, how they talked, mannerisms, opinions, everything, like some kind of crazy fan.

I reached the pinnacle when I met one and really did want to run off with him, even though my current man was sitting right there. The Fantasy Man did like me and he did think I was pretty. Fortunately, I can separate fantasy from reality. And I knew the reality would be no match for my daydreams. Yes, I wanted recognition from the Fantasy Man, but I also knew that it was truly only a fantasy and that I created the man I wanted. The real person could never be that and would only disappoint.

At that point, I wrote a poem called I'm So Down The Fantasy Man Don't Dig Me No More, in which I explored the idea that I had created a being to my own specifications. I created someone who wasn't real, of course. Yes, I know that. I'm not a complete idiot. But I wrote about the meeting of this real world and the fake one I created and how the fantasy sometimes collided with the real world to disastrous results.

The Fantasy Man in that poem wouldn't act like I wanted him to anymore. He stared at me and did exactly what he felt like doing. I had created him to my specs, with some mixture of reality and complete fabrication, and, in my poem, he let me know he was sick of it and wanted to be his own fucking person, shitty behavior and all. My daydreams don't include flaws and conflict (or really minor disputes or flaws) because I was all about soothing myself and living in a different reality without trauma. Which is also why I didn't usually turn them into fiction because without conflict, where's the story?

Believe me, I saw the flaws in the celebrities I was into: drug addictions, anger issues, abusive behavior, viciousness, alcoholism, smoking, sex addiction, anxiety, depression, possible ADHD or autism, agoraphobia, social anxiety, debilitating fear, paranoia, stupidity, lack of self-reflection and self-expression, recklessness, poor impulse control, narcissism, etc. All the things that inhabited my real life. These things describe, more or less, the majority of men who I interact with-then and now. Here's the thing, I've never had a decent relationship with a decent man. I've never had a non-traumatic, non-abusive relationship. I don't know if I believe in them. Men in my life are and have always been abusive, nasty, and generally horrible. The maladaptive daydreaming is not at all maladaptive but the only way to survive when I've had to be involved with assholes.

All the celebs I've loved seem to struggle with the toxic list above one way or another. Of course, I don't know any of them in real life but the things I read or watched often raised red flags. I wouldn't take these guys on a silver platter for real, for real. No thanks.

I wrote a poem about that, too, called Other Guys from Other Lives. It turns out that throughout my life I switched out one dude (like the others) for another. They're all the same: fantasy men (in their real lives, as far as I knew) and real life men. Every single one the same fucking man.

And I would end up hating every one of them as I do now. So, Fantasy Man, I have to create you to specs.

The nature of the daydreams was all about futzing with reality. So, I started at some point to make the daydreams about "I"-closer than ever to the real me (hi!). I tried to make the daydreams about "him" be as close to reality as possible, too. Without the horrendous baggage. (He bites his nails? Ok, I might live with that. He smokes? No thanks. He has anger issues? Not happening. Alcoholism? Nope, already live with that.) Fantasy Man wasn't close to his family growing up-that's fine. Add that in. I wasn't close to mine, either. Oh, we have that in common. Timelines were a little bit flexible, too. A story in my head could be about an earlier moment in Fantasy Man's life-before he put out album X or movie Z-or it could be fairly current (pandemic? No pandemic? Make that decision). I removed the most recent love interest/wife/partner because my character would become that in the story. Sometimes there was cheating and stealing someone away from someone else. Depended on my mood. If I knew who his friends were, they would appear sometimes. If I knew his colleagues, same. Recording sessions, press conferences, award ceremonies, coffee shops, movie sets-all of the locations were good for use in the daydreams.

I messed with my own character's age often and also gave her various careers, abilities, aspirations, interests, family, and friends. It was a delicate balance. I needed-no, really it's present tense-I need to have the context and character be close enough to "me" to capture what I must have in the fantasy (not sex, deeper than that, connection, love, intimacy, devotion, acceptance) but not too close as to bring my own huge problems in. I have to be a bit of someone else to feel okay. Why? I don't know. But I need to create a much better "me" than who I really am.

Or else how's the Fantasy Man going to fall madly in love with "me"?

I discovered, though, that when I brought the daydream "me" closer to the real "me" (without being too close), the payoff was greater. It's like a brain orgasm. The sweetness of the confession of love and acceptance inside my head was so compelling that I couldn't stop myself from repeating it in various iterations over and over. No one in real life can compete with that.

Well, they could and sometimes they did compete with it-and sometimes they even won me over. But it didn't last because how could it? The Fantasy Man was much, much better.

Maladaptive, you say? Well, yes it is.

Keeping me from reality, you say? Damn right.

Fucked up, you say? Uh huh.

So what about Real Person Fiction? It's one thing to write fanfiction or original fiction with characters-or to daydream in the privacy of one's own head-but to drag a real-life person (whom you don't know) into a story and plop it on a fanfic website is an entirely different thing. Hence, the issue of RPF. Fanfiction has been around for a long time in various formats. Real Person Fiction developed alongside Fanfic, as it's dirty, slimy cousin. It's considered a bad thing because those of us who write it are rewriting someone's life to fit whatever version of reality we've got going inside our dirty, slimy heads. I'm guilty of doing this myself. Back in the day, I was able to change names and details and no one was ever the wiser. Plus, I wasn't published anywhere and the internet didn't have as many options (that I knew of at the time) to make stories public. I wrote a number of stories starring Fantasy Man of the moment with those changes in place.

Then I started writing Fanfiction and did the same thing with Fantasy Man Version 2018. I changed names and some details. The story wasn't about "me" at all. In fact, it wasn't even a romance. It was a father/daughter story that filled my need for a decent father, which I never had. So there was that.

Then, I got involved in a writing group and asked the question about RPF, though I didn't really know the term or much of the history of it at that time. The response was mixed. Most people seemed squicked by romantic RPF because it was disrespectful to the real life people involved. It seems a bit uncomfortable to rewrite the life of someone I don't even know. And yet, to me, that person was almost "real" because of my ongoing daydream.

But I get it. So I dropped it and concentrated on self-inserts and fantasy man-inserts. I get many comments to this day about how close my characters are to Real-Life-Guy, even though we don't really know him. We don't know what he's really like in his own home with friends and family. We're all just guessing anyway. Nevertheless, I hit upon what people "think" he's like. Probably due to all the intense research I'm obsessed with.

My female character, if I'm not careful, is a straight-up self-insert. She's always the same, again, if I'm not paying attention. She's what I want to be mixed with how I am because I forgot that she doesn't have to react like I do. She's often out-of-character and I'm just damn lucky no one seems to notice or care.

I did ask one reader to compare the same fanfic story with a first-person narrator and a third-person narrator-same two characters, conflict, dialogue, etc. The reader said the first person story didn't fit her head-canon of the female character and thus was out-of-character and felt wrong. She said the female narrator sounded like me, which I fully believe. Third person was better but still off-the-mark, in her opinion. I couldn't decide if this was just because she didn't like my story, my writing, or my characterization. I guess it doesn't matter.

Which brings me to actual romantic RPF. I looked at similar stories, written about Fantasy Man Version 2018, and found some better than others. Characterization was a problem for me, since my head-canon is different. The Man didn't act like I thought he should and that showed me that daydreaming and stories are all fictionalization, no matter how real I'd like them to be. RPF isn't realistic or based on "reality." The Real Person is indeed a character after all. Yes, I know. I knew that going in. However, after I read some RPFs, I realized that the point wasn't to READ about Fantasy Man. It was to WRITE about Fantasy Man. It was an exercise in producing one's fantasy about him, perhaps to showcase a head-canon, perhaps to connect (at least in fiction) with some version of him that you'd like him to be. In real life, he isn't this, that, or the other thing that we RPF writers want him to be. Yet, the act of writing the story helps us live out a fantasy as close as possible to real life.

I think. Maybe.

The closer I can get (within certain parameters) to making this vision real, the better I like it. Often, writing straight-up fanfic doesn't hit the sweet spot because it's about two characters, neither of which are Fantasy Man or "me." Ultimately, I don't give a fuck about the characters from movies. I want the "real," RPF-version of Fantasy Man to love "ME." Fantasy Man, the real celebrity-not the character from Fanfic, movies, or albums-has to love the "real me," my daydream fabrication. This "real me" doesn't exist except in my head; that's why we're using quotation marks here. But as I get closer to "real me" in the daydreams, the better connected I am to Fantasy Man. The deeper I'm connected, the more the daydream helps me with my daily and past trauma. Complete self-soothing by a non-existent partner.

People might say that this leads to unrealistic expectations in real-life relationships or that it leads to a preference for daydreams over reality. Okay, I get that. It doesn't, but I do understand how one could say that. When I've had relationships that worked, I've still engaged in daydreaming, though perhaps less when I've been happy. When relationships have been bad, I've done it because I wanted to self-soothe. Yet, there were times when I didn't daydream at all, and, oddly enough, it had little to do with my situation or the state of my relationships. It had more to do with the plug-in to a Fantasy Man-in other words, I didn't have a celeb crush at the moment. I might have had some interest in eye-candy men, but the deep imprinting didn't occur for some reason. Not like the state I've been in for quite a while now, where there's no other Fantasy Man but that one and I think about him to the point of obsession.

I would never ever want to meet the celebrity in real life because the "real me" doesn't want that. The "real me" wants a dopamine hit of fantasy, not the reality of some guy looking at me like he doesn't know me and would never be interested in me. Because he wouldn't. Ever. And the same was true when I was younger, too. Fantasy Man would never have wanted the in-real-life me because I was too young, too whatever. I wouldn't have wanted him either, though at certain points I may have tried to convince myself otherwise.

There was only that one moment when it could all have come together and I saw it. I reached out for a brief second and stood there looking into blue eyes. And I realized he would be a horrible partner, like all the other horrible partners I ever had.

I walked away. Back into the perfect fantasy.

Needs and desires completely fulfilled.

Maladaptive daydreaming.

health/mental-health/maladaptive-daydreaming

2015/08/29/other-guys-from-other-lives/

I can't find the poem I'm So Down The Fantasy Man Don't Dig Me No More

2017/04/29/when-was-i-supposed-to/