When Daydreaming Becomes a Nightmare

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Kristen French Get the Nautilus newsletter

Throw on the Power Lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” shouts the commander to his crew, as he navigates through the worst storm in his 20 years of flying. A harrowing scene unfolds but then Walter Mitty is brought back to reality by the sound of his wife’s voice, the daydream fading into the byways of his mind. Not long after that, he’s struck with a new fantasy, and then another. Over the course of an afternoon, while running mundane errands, Mitty proceeds to have a series of increasingly dazzling daydreams in which he performs acts of great heroism, vivid narratives that bubble like a geyser into his mind.

This is the plot of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a short story written by James Thurber in 1939 that has been retold over and over in popular film and theater adaptations. The story has captured so many imaginations because getting lost in daydreams is a very human thing to do. We all occasionally script narratives in our minds in which our deepest desires come true, as a refuge from some of the more disappointing facts of life.

For some, though, the delight of daydreaming can turn into a curse: The fantasies become such a successful form of escape that they take over the mind, becoming compulsive and preventing the dreamer from paying attention to important facets of reality—work, school, other people.

Psychologists have been fascinated with daydreams since at least the time of Freud, who believed they bore the hallmarks of unconscious yearnings and conflicts. But Israeli research and clinical psychologist Eli Somer was the first to describe excessive daydreaming as a distinct psychiatric problem. At the turn of the millennium, a group of patients caught his attention. He was treating two dozen individuals for child abuse, and six of them reported spending hours at a time every day engaged in fantasies, often imagining idealized versions of themselves—in these dreams, they were deeply loved, sometimes heroic, often famous.

Shifting is a very strange experience. It’s like an extremely vivid dream, yet it’s more real than any dream I’ve ever had.

Somer’s patients told him their dreamscapes felt more vivid than life itself, though this wasn’t a form of hallucination or psychosis. They knew they were indulging in fantasy. To help embody their fantasies, they often made repetitive movements, such as rocking, spinning, pacing, or jumping, and would enact dialogue, facial expressions, and other imagined events. They would also play music to set the emotional tone for the scenes they were scripting in their minds. But the daydreaming began to take over their lives, interfering with school, work, and social relationships—and they were steeped in shame about it.

Here were the hallmarks of psychopathology, says Somer, who works at the University of Haifa, whose practice is focused on childhood trauma. He called the condition maladaptive daydreaming and published a paper about it in 2002. Somer says not long after the paper came out, a flood of emails began to pour in from all corners of the world. People were stumbling upon his research, recognizing themselves in it, and writing to him for help. Many of these daydreamers also formed online communities: One Reddit group dedicated to maladaptive daydreaming has over 100,000 members today. Some estimates suggest that the condition may affect 2.5 to 4 percent of the population.

“I cannot stand alone a minute without daydreaming, cannot go to the toilet without daydreaming, cannot go to the store without daydreaming. I am always burnt out,” says one daydreamer and member of the Reddit community, who started doing it to escape from the pain of childhood bullying. “I am not a normal person, I cannot socialize, I cannot do homework, I cannot control my emotions.”

People who daydream in this way do so to relieve feelings of guilt, shame, loneliness, anxiety, and stress and experience themselves as leading two parallel lives, according to recent work by researchers in the field of dissociative disorders, including Somer and Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel. The daydreams cut them off from external reality, reducing their ability to respond to their surroundings and to their internal thoughts, feelings, memories, actions, and sense of self. They become estranged from subjective experience, a hallmark of dissociation. Unlike normal daydreaming, this form of daydreaming is an addiction that features facets of obsessive-compulsive behavior, dissociative coping, and lack of attention control, Somer and others who have studied the disorder believe. The symptoms are persistent, compulsive, and detrimental to a person’s life, and require special forms of treatment.

But other psychologists argue that we shouldn’t pathologize activities like daydreaming that are a normal part of the daily lives of most adults and that doing so might obscure underlying problems that are the true cause of any mental illness. Excessive daydreaming, they contend, may just be a behavioral manifestation of other disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder, which is thought to be set off by childhood trauma and to interfere with a child’s development of a continuous sense of self across emotional states, relationships, and social contexts.

In his work, Somer has noticed that what he calls an “addiction” to daydreaming only arises with immersive fantasies, the kind that are very vivid, where you feel a sense of presence. Immersion is what makes the daydreaming so engrossing, such an attractive alternative to the real world, he says. Daydreaming is often conflated with mind-wandering in the psychological literature, but they are distinct. “Mind wandering is the mental activity that is in action when the mind is off task and is sort of roaming from one idea to the other,” says Somer. “Daydreaming on the other hand, is on task. It’s about creating a narrative, a storyline, and concentrating on it and imagining it.”

Truly immersive daydreams can overwhelm the senses, according to Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist known for her studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. “The more vivid the daydream becomes, the more it comes to feel like it’s happening to you. You’re not inventing it. It’s something that imposes itself upon you,” she says. “There’s a point at which it begins to overwhelm the ordinary sensory world.”

Certain kinds of people seem to be more capable of this kind of immersion in fantasy than others—like those who have experienced trauma and learned to dissociate from reality to avoid intense feelings. “We know that people who are higher in absorption, are more able to get absorbed in their inner experience of invisible others,” says Lurhmann. Others who are susceptible include people who tend to have very vivid mental imagery—also known as hyperplasia—as well as those who pray or who meditate frequently, she says, and people who see the boundary between the mind and the world as permeable.

Scripting elaborate fantasies in the mind is not, by itself, something that can ruin the psyche and lead to mental illness. During the pandemic, a practice called “reality shifting” surged in popularity, with practitioners posting short videos about it on TikTok. Even now that the pandemic has subsided, reality shifting seems to have millions of followers online who share tips about how to do it. Like maladaptive daydreamers, the folks who practice reality shifting use imaginative narratives to distance themselves from their current realities and can spend hours at a time immersed in these fantasies.

I cannot stand alone a minute without daydreaming, cannot go to the store without daydreaming.

“Shifting is a very strange experience. It’s like an extremely vivid dream, yet it’s more real than any dream I’ve ever had,” explains one reality shifter on TikTok. “Before I plan on shifting, I write myself a script in the notes app on my phone, in which I plan exactly what happens in the desired reality. This makes it easier to visualize exactly what I want to happen.”

Many of the people who practice reality shifting seem to believe that their alternate realities are just as real as reality—and that they have tapped into a parallel universe made possible by multiverse theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics. They report feeling a strong sense of presence in these experiences and use methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion to make the shift. But they also tend to feel pride rather than shame about the practice.

“Some of them even have sort of an elitist air to them, a belief that they are capable of doing something that others are unable to do,” says Somer, who coauthored a study about the practice in 2021. “The feeling that I get from reading some of their exchanges is they have discovered something unique and that they are privileged to be able to do it, and they want to share this privilege with others. It’s almost like proselytizing.”

Novelist Daniel Frey thinks the mediated nature of our reality today makes getting lost in fantasy a bigger risk, one of the themes of his most recent novel Dreambound. “As we spend more and more time in virtual spaces, and caring about and talking about and interacting with fictional work, it starts to sort of seep into your values in such a way that the question of whether or not something is literally true becomes important for so little of your life,” he says.

The epidemic of loneliness that is the curse of our modern era could also play a part in the recent surge in obsessive fantasizing, Somer says. Daydreaming can seem like a great solution to loneliness, at first, but ultimately it just leaves one more isolated. The connections one fantasizes evaporate with the dream.

To help his maladaptive daydreamers, Somer uses a combination of techniques. He starts with a common addiction treatment called motivational interviewing, which trains people to develop short powerful statements they can rely on to interrupt the urge to daydream. He also has them track their daydreaming, for accountability and awareness. “You want to note not only the amount of time you were in fantasy, but also the patterns of when you tend to do it, what precedes the need to fantasize, and what the outcome is.”

And he counsels them to do stuff that they can’t do while fantasizing, like talking to real people in their lives, or mindfulness training—increasing their awareness of real-life sounds, smells, and physical sensations. He also uses psychotherapy to address the underlying pain, fear, and anxiety that lead people to retreat into their fantasy lives so heavily in the first place. The cure for unhealthy daydreaming, says Somer, is reconnecting with the real world.