Maladaptive daydreaming

Maladaptive daydreaming, also known as excessive daydreaming, is a disordered form of dissociative absorption associated with vivid and excessive fantasy activity that often involves elaborate and fanciful scenarios. It can result in distress, can replace human interaction and may interfere with normal functioning such as social life or work. People who suffer from maladaptive daydreaming can spend hours at a time daydreaming, often to pass extended periods without mental stimulation. Maladaptive daydreaming, also known as excessive daydreaming, is a disordered form of dissociative absorption associated with vivid and excessive fantasy activity that often involves elaborate and fanciful scenarios. It can result in distress, can replace human interaction and may interfere with normal functioning such as social life or work. People who suffer from maladaptive daydreaming can spend hours at a time daydreaming, often to pass extended periods without mental stimulation. Maladaptive daydreaming is typically associated with stereotypical movements, such as pacing or rocking, and the need for musical stimulation. One of the lead researchers of maladaptive daydreaming and the person who coined the term is University of Haifa professor Eli Somer. Somer's definition of the condition is “extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning.” Many human experiences range between the normal to the abnormal. Daydreaming, a form of normal dissociation associated with absorption, is a highly prevalent mental activity experienced by almost everyone. It is thought to encompass almost half of all human thought, with hundreds of daydreaming sequences experienced daily. Some individuals possess the ability to daydream so vividly that they experience a sense of presence in the imagined environment. This experience is reported to be extremely rewarding to the extent that some of those who experience it develop a compulsion to repeat it that is often described as an addiction. The scientific literature suggests that a portion of people with maladaptive daydreaming can spend up to 60% of their waking time daydreaming, and could, therefore, be classified as suffering from a behavioral addiction. Stimuli for maladaptive daydreams range in all kinds of places, and their “symptoms” are also numerous. The overall symptom is extremely vivid fantasies with “story-like features,” such as the daydream’s characters, plots and settings. Characters can be real people the maladaptive daydreamer knows, or made up ones, and the same goes with settings and plots. Media sources, such as movies, video games and music, are probably major influences in a maladaptive daydreamer’s life, and this is why these fantasies are often shaped like a novel or film. Also, time spent in a maladaptive daydreaming may prompt the daydreamer to pace, fiddle with something in their hand, or rock back and forth. Maladaptive daydreamers usually get very mentally and emotionally involved in their fantasies, causing the daydreamers to react physically by gesturing, laughing, talking, and making faces that fit whatever fantasized scenario they are in. Maladaptive daydreaming is not a psychosis issue. The daydreams are not reality - maladaptive daydreamers always know this. Though maladaptive daydreaming and psychosis problems, like schizophrenia, both deal with people avoiding reality, psychosis is about people who are utterly detached from reality. This means that psychotic people cannot differentiate fantasy from reality, whereas people with maladaptive daydreaming always know the difference between what is in their mind and what is actually happening in the world. Though maladaptive daydreaming is not yet an officially recognized psychiatric problem, meaning that people cannot be officially diagnosed with it yet, it has spawned numerous online and real-world support groups since Somer first identified the phenomenon in 2002. There is a large and growing number of online international maladaptive daydreaming groups that provide information and peer-support, on which individuals profess to have been secretly suffering from maladaptive daydreaming for years. The grass-root effort by sufferers to increase awareness of their condition manifested itself in a global spontaneous effort to translate the 16-item maladaptive daydreaming scale, MDS-16. The MDS-16 has been translated, so far, into 29 languages, by qualified individuals who struggle with this condition.