Back in the 1990s when women were rarely considered for Autism I was treated for depression and given Seroxat (a selective serotonin repítale inhibitor). It felt like my mind, my personality, my capacity for joy, was smooshed under a thick, unmovable damp carpet. Yes, I no longer dropped into the abyss of despair but there was nowhere pleasant to climb to either. Living felt like existing - with one exception, my inner life exploded.
The problem with it is that I couldn’t always keep hold of reality. I’d be watching something, or hear a sound, or breathe in a smell and WHOOOSH! I’d recollect, all of a sudden, and everything in an instant, hours and hours of memories of an event, or a series of events, and I’d then have to pick through and sort out what it was, where it had come from, figure out how to come to terms with it, and only once had I had the chance to play over all the details (again, it took an instant to arrive and hours to unpack) did I come to the point where I could figure out if the data arrival was the recollection of a dream or if it was something that had happened or if it was a synthesis of me having tried to come to terms with something that happened or something I had dreamed before.
And as I am the absolute opposite of a multi-tasker, coming to terms with the arrived explosion left me with little capacity to deal with what was actually happening.
You probably have had a similar experience. Think of times when you have been asleep and dreaming and you wake up because of an external sensation, someone tapping your face, a nearby driver sounding their car horn, and when you wake up you have the memory of a dream with a long lead in to explain the event that woke you up.
Example might be a dream where you are somehow convinced to join a gym class and when you turn up thinking that it will involve aerobics find out that it’s kick-boxing and you end up in a boxing ring having your face punched by a local librarian. Turns out that your kid had patted your face to rouse you so all of those dream memories occurred instantaneously.
Now imagine that intrusive explosion of recollection coming to you whilst you are awake and having a lovely daydream about something else entirely. You have no way to get back to your enjoyable daydream until you unpack the explosion. It might take minutes, it might take days. Sometimes you feel as if you are in a deja-vu loop having already done the unpacking before.
That is my own personal experience of maladaptive daydreaming. I imagine that everyone has their own personal experiences.
Thankfully, mine more or less stopped when I came off Seroxat, I’ve had echoes, but not to the same degree of intensity and regularity.
Anything close I can lessen with the ping-pong peripheral gaze exercise, which only takes 30-50 seconds about 3 or 4 times a day.