My Experience of Maladaptive Daydreaming
(This is from a paper I was writing for my class. I wanted to post it online because it might help others understand maly-d better, and let you know you are not alone in dealing with this.)
I’ve never really written about this. I’m a little scared. It's called Maladaptive Daydreaming. And I’m 95% percent sure I’ve got it. It has affected my life, for a very, very long time. Before I go on, let me explain briefly what it is. “ Common symptoms include: extremely vivid daydreams with their own characters, settings, plots, and other detailed, story-like features, an overwhelming desire to continue daydreaming, making facial expressions while daydreaming, whispering and talking while daydreaming, daydreaming for lengthy periods (many minutes to hours).”
They started in fifth grade. (I’m going through my three most important daydreams) The first was Zenobia, a story about a hero (Me) going to a magical land called Zenobia, to defeat an evil witch, also called Zenobia. Daydreaming about yourself becoming a hero is common in maladaptive daydreaming. In that world you are important, probably because in real life you don’t feel that way. I was a hero (so was Grace and Daniel) and we defeated the Evil witch. The twist in the end is that I was actually the one who created everything, even Zenobia, and that I landed there without remembering that. And that I created Zenobia because I was lonely.
The second was somewhere around seventh or eighth grade. World of Color. This world didn’t include me as the hero. I based my character off Colors. Orange, Blue, Yellow, Cyan, Green, and Pink. (In order of creation.) The story goes something like this: Orange is a shy girl who meets the other girls, the other girls become her friends and teach her how to ice skate. I think I based my story more in Anime than real life. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to remove myself from that world. But anyway, I fantasized about that all the time, seeing the different friendships play out, each two characters would have their own dynamics. But I think the meaning is simply that I wanted friends to encourage me, be there for me. To pick me up when I fell down.
My current fantasy started somewhere around my junior year. I listened to Wombats (my favorite band.) religiously. One of the biggest triggers for maladaptive daydreaming is music. So, Quartet was born. The characters are distinct, all very different from one another. The story goes something like this: A rag-tag group of young adults decide to form a garage band and live in the same house together for a year. (Their names are Neptune, Lavender, Magenta and Gray.) The meaning of this one is that people are everything. People define and shape your life. And to find and create your own family.
I create because I am lonely. Because I want to be accepted and loved. Because I want someone to talk to, to be there for me and understand my every gesture. I want the freedom to express myself, to be heard. I want to yell and scream. I want to run and sing. I want to not give a fuck and say whatever I want, dump out all my dirty secrets, be as stupid weird and wild as I want to. (Did I just cuss in paper??? Oh god, I probably shouldn’t do that.)
“Behind every daydream, there is a feeling. It drives your plot, it molds your characters. It’s the mastermind behind it all. Every character, every single story is an embodiment of it. The entire narrative content of your specific daydream is driven by an emotion that you failed and continuously fail to express in real life- and as long as this particular emotion remains unexpressed in your real life, by your real self, the respective daydream which is driven by it will not stop.”
I create because I am lonely. I dream because I don’t want to bottle up my emotions, which in turn, bottles up my emotions. It’s very dissociative, this disorder. You lose sight of who you really are, you forget which pieces you hid in what characters, and you struggle to get them out. But the goal is not to get rid of these characters. You are them. They are you. You vent your emotions into them. But you need to vent those emotions through you. To let yourself feel the pain, the hurt, the love and the happiness.