what could be happening in a strangers mind
Maladaptive daydreaming is an intense mental habit where a person gets lost in detailed, vivid inner worlds for hours at a time.
Maladaptive daydreaming is common, I'm not special for doing it.
My daydream world started young, and was not maladaptive to begin with. Instead of playing on a nonexistent Wii (I didn't know they existed), I made up an “imaginary world”.
For me it wasn't imaginary, it was real but just not visible to anyone else but me. I called it Invisible World. And one of my sisters would play along.
In this world We each had a twin brother, mine's name was Leo. We don't have actual brothers, so we made them act out how we assumed brothers would act. I simply played myself in this Invisible World and would "switch" between there and the real world.
As I got older, asking my sister if she wanted to “play” Invisible World lessened. After a while, she completely left the world.
The world never left me though, even till this day.
The Invisible World became more complex. It was a parody of my life and I no longer played the role of my real self. TC in Invisible World is prettier, richer, and more extroverted than real life me. TC in Invisible World has lived through soap opera-like drama and trauma and dated characters inspired by real-life or cartoon crushes. She's the popular one in every social setting, and multi-talented, something I've always wanted to be. Despite all that, she’s not perfect and has all of my bad personality traits as well.
I remember one imaginative evening as a teenager where I was listening to music and I began to imagine her at a nightclub, dancing and singing on the raised platform with everyone cheering at her. For a long time I wanted to be a famous performer.
Nowadays she’s married (or divorced, depending on my mood that day) to a deeply flawed man of high social status. She has a son with the same namesake as the aforementioned invisible brother, who doesn't show up in the world anymore. Sometimes the married storyline doesn’t fit my mood, so I go with my alternative storyline in which her kid still exists, but lives in a boarding school and is being raised by his father’s family. In that scenario she's just doing whatever she wants, like a terrible mother.
I no longer have to make-up drama based on TV. When there is something bad that happens in my life, I immediately implement it into the Invisible World cannon. That way I don’t have to address it alone.
There are times where scenarios in that world become real. Like when I was in Korea, I was asked to dance on the pool table. Not that I was hot, but I’m a foreign woman, and guys went to those clubs to pick up and meet foreign women. In the moment I thought back to my younger self and wrote in my old blog that I achieved a “childhood dream”.
Ever since then, I’ve had a strong desire to make more of the other “events” from my Invisible World come true in real life. But in the real world you can't just materialize situations with your mind.
Healthy sex, getting married, having a kid, being financially stable. Those seem to be in the category of Unrealistic Invisible World Scenarios, so they are unchanging plot points. If these remain a constant in my alternative world, I (hopefully) won’t have the feeling of missing out.
I've developed what is essentially a life standard in my brain over the past 15 years that I now that i feel pressure to live up to, or else it’s all meaningless. It became more enjoyable to imagine myself in Invisible World than to live in the real world. I seriously cannot live with the idea that I’m not doing anything meaningful in this real world. This feeling is growing as I get older.
The thing is, I don't feel sorry for myself. There’s something about how I was raised (I'm assuming) that fails to let me realistically fall into a hole of self pity and/or feeling like it’s someone else's fault. I know it’s all on me.
I think about this about 12 hours a day on average, occasionally all waking hours. Even at work and school. Nothing can stop 15 years of maladaptive daydreaming.