A while back, I finally succumbed to the guilt The Guardian pokes at their readers and gave them money. Now I get those headline summary emails so I wind up there even more. This is probably an error in judgment, altho I did encounter this really interesting article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/28/i-just-go-into-my-head-and-enjoy-it-the-people-who-cant-stop-daydreamingGo ahead and go read it. It’s really interesting and worth knowing about, whereas this is just me trying to reconstruct what’s going on over in psychiatric diagnosis-land and predict where they will go next.
I had a bunch of reactions to the article. First, I was like, yep, I did a lot of that Back in the Day and honestly, I sorta miss it. I had a lot of strategies over the years for dealing with the relentless boredom of the Kingdom Hall. When I was quite young, I’d sneak books in and read them, but predictably, someone would eventually notice. Then I resorted to reading the books that were legitimately there, of which the only one with any persistent interest was obviously the Bible, and the only really worthwhile books in there for a girl are Esther and Ruth. And honestly, you can only read those so many times before you’ve basically memorized them.
So after _that_, I just sat there and went inside my head. Also, I had a ludicrously early bedtime and didn’t need anywhere near the sleep they wanted me to sleep so that I wouldn’t bug them (and enforcement involved beatings with a stick if I read by the hall light, which, fortunately, they backed down on after I dolefully responded to a teacher at school who thought it was great that I read so much and then I said, no, it’s bad and explained about the beatings).
Sorry about the lack of trigger warnings, but _I DID_ start with an article about maladaptive daydreaming, and if you read the Guardian piece and looked up dissociative disorders, you should have been expecting some severe trauma stories next!
Obviously, I _don’t_ miss being bored out of my school for a number of hours a week that qualifies as a substantial part time job. But the daydreams were really, really, really vivid and because I could control them, obviously more enjoyable than my actual life. When I learned there was a corner of TikTok land in which people describe how to go into alternate reality, I was like, hunh, sounds like they’re doing what I did to avoid going bonkers during church (for the record: I never lost track of what was going on around me! I polled reality and nothing happened very fast so a delay wasn’t particularly noticeable. I didn’t do in church what I sometimes did at home, which was to stare at a wall and just let my mind empty completely. Couldn’t do that in church; people would freak out).
My second reaction to reading the article was, I wonder if this would explain schizoid and schizotypal personality disorders. I tend to think of those two as autism plus other things, with a big question mark next to avoidant personality disorder as possibly being the same.
Heck, it might explain schizophrenia — maybe someone just got stuck in their daydream and forgot to come back out, or maybe people are interacting with a part of the person’s awareness that’s there as a sentinel and overloading the amount of resources the person has devoted to the sentinel. That’s the problem I ran into with the stare at a wall activity. I left an internal timer, not expecting to be interrupted, but for some reason that I never did find out, my mother came upstairs unexpectedly and found me non-responsive, eyes open, sitting in a chair and nothing she could do was getting me to respond (experimenting with catatonia for fun! Yes, my early life had some really, really big problems!). She thought I’d had a seizure or was doing drugs or who knows what but she panicked hard and I never did find out why she’d come upstairs in the first place. Future sessions of staring at a wall involved much more careful planning.
Anyway.
Other people have asked roughly the same question.
https://www.psychforums.com/schizotypal-personality/topic190248.html“ I was just wondering whether or not Maladaptive Daydreaming, to which I am very much prone, would come under the umbrella of schizotypal or schizoid personality disorders. I've heard that fantasising can be a feature of Avoidant PD, which I do have.”
An answer — from 2017!!! —
“I do it constantly. Most recently I conceived this whole rock opera upon the premise Manson (or me as a present day iteration) actually got a record deal and reframed the whole Helter Skelter thing as a "war for light" as some sort of Luciferian Lightbringer nonsense. I was totally wrapped up in it, writing lyrics and melodies in my head for weeks at work, "as if" my job were just "for now" and this horrifying performance art is my 'real gig' and just what this ridiculous society needs. Really reframing reality with the whole thing until dissonance creeps in and I realize I see myself as 20 years younger than I actually am and realize I'm way too avolitional and oppositional to ever do this for real. And yet for once, this time it really served to vent a lot of societal/institutional rage just in conceiving it.Also, my lyrics kind of come unbidden in a nursery rhymey way thats full of silly "clang association" and multiple entendres that my neurotypical friends love receiving at like 2:30 in the morning. Or not. I was ALL about this a couple weeks ago, totally ready to shock the world and stomp all over model cities on stage, beat up mannequins etc...In true INTP (5w4) form, having dreampt it was as good as doing it and I'm much relieved to go back to poring over forums and articles in front of the TV.
STPD,BPD,BP,DD/NOS,ADD”
I included the whole thing, because it’s quite detailed and _all_ of it maps really well to q-sters who describe how they fell into q-land, and how they came back out. Also, the list of diagnoses is _highly_ suggestive that a lot of diagnoses are actually interacting with _things people are doing inside their head on purpose_. Or with purpose. Or whatever.
If you want more:
https://www.quora.com/Is-maladaptive-daydreaming-a-symptom-of-schizotypal-personality-disorderThe “cure”, such as it is, is what I found to be personally true. Fix your life, and maladaptive daydreaming isn’t needed any more. This is probably why I keep thinking that every addiction and other problem with mental health can be improved by improving one’s life circumstances (whether that’s decluttering or finding people to hang out with who actually care about you or exercising or eating better food or getting enough sleep or whatever).
This link breaks maladaptive daydreaming down in ways where it suggests that many of the components of daydreaming have highly functional alternate uses:
https://qr.ae/pvgHhrSomeone at quora linked to this:
https://maladaptivedaydreamingguide.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/part-i-fantasy-and-fall-of-the-self/This _does not_ resonate with me at all. Not saying that’s not going on with other people, but that doesn’t feel like what I was going through.
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