Can any maladaptive daydreamers help or empathise or just talk to me?

[fuckinghellapeacock]

I have been a maladaptive daydreamer since I was a toddler. I have it under control and find it therapeutic and helpful, very soothing, helps me get to sleep. I have no intention of stopping and don't want to, that's not what this is about.

Amongst the many things the fucking corona virus has ruined, is my best story to get to sleep to! It can't work with social distancing etc. It is also incredibly ludicrous so why can't I just carry on as always - why is the fucking corona virus interfering? I find it much harder to get to sleep.

I am hoping to find someone else who has experienced similar so I feel less mad. Thanks for reading

Im so amused and pleased,how similar we all are

I have learned bits of other languages to enrich the experience (in fact, rather annoyingly, i had to ‘rewite‘ a major character in a different daydream to accommodate the fact that the few bits of language id learned kept bleeding between daydreams)

I can imagine crazy scenarios, but something mundane can render them unplayable. (Like i can be an undead superhero , no problem , but can’t imagine a Covid vaccine)

I often pretend to be napping or,listening to music, but actually am daydreaming.

I do this and didn't know it had a name. I thought there was something wrong with me. It made sense to create these fantasies as a child, because I was a child, but to carry it on as a teenager and then an adult, made me feel a bit crazy! So I decided I was an upcoming author and needed to play out these scenarios in my head with myself as the main character of the book. This also helps me get over some things that occur that are not realistic at all. If it's happening in a fictional book that I'm starring in, erm I mean writing, then it doesn't need to be realistic!

I'm so messed up. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Wow, I never knew there was a name for this.

Come to think of it, Covid has affected mine as well because it involved a working from home lifestyle which I've come to realise is not all it's cracked up to be!

I find it funny I'm not the only one who needs to fact check the minor details, or have some level of realism when the whole point of it is an unrealistic fantasy life.

Mine are normally pretty mundane, probably maladaptive, definitely filling in for things I'm missing in real life... A therapist would have a field day

I've done this on and off since childhood as well (which was, in hindsight, a bit of a clusterfuck). I know when I'm stressed or not coping well as it starts to dominate daily life, rather than just being a brief escape.

Covid hasn't interfered so much, but I can play around with time and/or alternate universes in mine, so it's pretty easy to explain away the lack of covid as 'not in this timeline' or 'that was so last year'.

Not sure if that's viable for others though as I've always had quite the scifi edge to mine. The first one I remember when I was about 4 or 5, was frankensteins monster breaking into our house in the middle of the night and carrying me off over the garden fences to live in a cave far away. Sad, I guess, that what would be a nightmare for most children was my go-to self-soothing story.

I'm regretting moving two of my characters to US as it's just too depressing to follow them
In the current situation there.
Just have to concentrate more on the ones in U.K. and France.

I love how we all have such complex inner worlds, the level of detail is startling.

This is so interesting. Both my Mum and I are maladaptive daydreamers. However, her daydreams are always grounded in reality and must be possible, like the OP. Mine are more fantasy-like and have parallel universes, time travel and magic. My main characters and story arcs have been going since I was 7.

@KittyFantastico, I love long car rides too!

In my daydream life coronavirus doesn’t feature and hasn’t happened.

I see you've had some good advice already OP but could you shift the timeframe a bit so the scenario happens at some not-too-distant future point, where we've found a vaccine and there's no need for social distancing anymore?

This is fascinating. Another one here who didn't know this is what they're called. I've done this my whole life although like PPs theyre becoming less intense with age - not sure why. I used to call them my 'thinks' and chat about them assuming it was normal. I remember my DM being worried about me as I'd sit staring into the fire for hours, totally immersed in a think.

I have a different fantasy husband, house and children.
I have taken my love of gardening up a scale with a job as a planetary ecologist, sent to dead planets to design new ecosystems for them.
I often intervene in atrocities and tragedies to head off the bad thing and prevent it happening.
Covid hasn't wrecked any of mine, but my DF getting dementia has switched off the one where I get a damehood and he's proud of me

Thinking about what so many of you are saying about needing a factual basis to your fantasies, something that anchors it, maybe that’s helpful in that it’s stopping you from escaping too much, your brain is putting a brake on for you because it knows you have something real you should be dealing with. It might be a good thing in that’s it’s keeping you in the here and now, but because you feel anxious with your soothing mechanism it doesn’t feel that way. As I said earlier maybe try and find additional healthy methods of self soothing to supplement what normally works.

I’m an Olympic athlete in mine.
I have a long detailed background involving being an orphan and winning against all the odds.
Now I’m retired and commentate on all the major sporting events.

I didn’t realise there was a name for this. All of my verbal thought is daydreaming, so I guess that’s maladaptive. I’ve found it a bit more difficult with covid. I don’t know why, some of my daydreams are completely out there but there are some that have an underlying premise which is no longer realistic which makes them less absorbing.