Vivid Imagination

Disorder or protection

      I am 40 years old and up until the past couple years, I did not know that other people shared the same story that I have.  I never really told anyone about it because I never even knew how to explain it. Maladaptive daydreaming goes outside the borders of daydreaming, fantasy, story telling, and make believe. This is a world that exists in the brain of the story writer and is more real than reality itself. It is like a movie that is continually going and you are writing the script for everyone as you go. You are in complete control of what happens, and you can press stop, pause, rewind and fast forward anytime you wish. Most people I have talked to or read about that live with this condition play many different characters and at all different times. I myself was always the 'me' that I thought was perfect.  I believe that this subject is so complex and different for everyone but I have found that it all boils down to an escape, an insecurity, and a trauma. It is the result of something that didn't have the ending we wanted and we aren't done with it yet so we are going to make our own. It is a win situation; if we fail at something in reality then we will act it out in our way to where we not just won but we did 10 times better showing everyone involved how much we can make them proud instead of disappointment.
Maladaptive daydreaming is a triggered action our subconscious takes reality to when it doesn't know how to deal with and confront our fears and insecurities. Then we escape to whatever world we can play the writer or the role that we feel we have control. This gives us the confidence and pleasure we feel we lost out on. This even goes with sexual abuse, physical abuse, being abandoned, loosing a loved one, seeing and experiencing trauma, most childhood experiences (good and bad), being left out when we are young, having sickness, feeling rejected, being lied too, not good enough, unloved, unwanted, and the list goes on.

       I always believed and still do that I am so much greater than I allow myself to be.  When I was a child, in my mind I was a star! I obsessed about it so much and started acting out things I would say, friends I would have, situations that would happen. I developed myself so specifically that my subconscious was convinced that  I was this character. This is the law of attraction on steroids, an obsessive, over processed, positive thinking in the most negative way.  It is right there between obsessive compulsive disorder and delusions but yet not considered a mental disorder at all.  It in fact has its disorderly way in coping with emotional stresses, however there are also positive sides to this reaction. It opens up your creative mind to a whole different spectrum. It is unbelievable the things, people, places and feelings I just would come up with; like  in improvisational theatre. Also, discovering things that you truly want out of life. It is like playing house when we are kids, we discover that maybe having made believe kids when we are playing the parent was a good thing before jumping into the reality of parenthood, and you wanted different things out of life.

      When you are giving your subconscious these confusing vibes from acting out your make believe, it goes into a state of survival mode. It truly believes you and just assumes that whatever it is that you are fantasizing or playing out is indeed what is going on.  When I said that I knew what it was like to feel the rush of adrenaline from being on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people, I was not fibbing. My subconscious had let me experience this just as some other child star that really dis these things. Because I put so much emotion and believed in what I was doing, that sent energy to the subconscious. I had spent so many hours outside of my reality world and focused, physically playing out as if it were real so many hours in my fantasy world. The difference between a daydream and  a maladaptive daydream is the amount of time spent in this and the amount of physical energy and mind set. A regular daydream like mentioned before, lasts a few moments and usually the body is in a calm relaxed state  where there is typically no movement or visual signs of action. Maladaptive is not so in that these daydreams can go on for years, and the body interacts with what is happening in the daydream. For example if there is a physical fight, the body will punch, roll, kick, scream, cry, have all the real emotions anyone would have in reaction to the fight.

        The subconscious is always doing its best to be one step ahead of us to guide us and protect us; giving us a clear intuition. When an individual has a trigger of some kind, it is usually followed by an emotion instructed by the subconscious to react and deal with that memory.  For the individual with  MD, the subconscious takes a different route, our brains do not register as daydreaming, we are still in the same mode if not more than we are during regular interaction. All senses are higher, all emotions are deeper, everything kicked up higher. The energy and vibrations we out out are powerful because we are coming from our source energy. This can be good and this can be bad, we must find a balance.