I love a good daydream. One minute you’re seated in front of a laptop reading through the requirements for your dream job overseas, and in a split second, you're standing in a new corner office with a gorgeous view of your new city (and yes, this may or may not be a Harvey Specter reference). And that's not all—you also have a fat salary and an even fatter relocation bonus, and all you have to worry about is what tie to choose each morning. Or you're scrolling through Instagram and an ad pops up for an all-expense-paid getaway trip to Seychelles. In an instant, you’re seated by the clear blue waters, adorned in a bright bikini, a fresh piña colada served in a coconut shell in hand, glazed from face to feet in SPF 50, and a massive straw hat over your head because, if we’re honest, you can never have too much sun protection.
Sometimes it's not even a physical shift. You could be in a meeting, listening to your manager reiterate for the hundredth time how your team is failing to meet the monthly sales target, and you get up angrily and retort, "Oga, you sef run am if e easy." But of course, you don’t say that, and all you can do is painstakingly revert your consciousness to his rants and find solace in the possibility that saying it may have shut him up and given him a lot to think about. That, my friend, is a little daydream or, rightfully termed, maladaptive daydreaming.
Maladaptive daydreaming is a term that describes excessive daydreaming that cuts through one's daily life. It occurs when one dissociates from reality and is wholly immersed in their imagination, becoming engrossed for long periods. It is a form of self-induced, conscious escapism. The time spent immersed in these dreams could span from minutes to hours. As a result of the solace this escape provides, it is not uncommon for some daydreamers to even take the extra effort to read voraciously and watch visual content that helps build and construct this false reality to perfection.
Most of my formative years were spent in boarding school, and someone once asked how I managed to navigate it. I simply replied “I was in my head a lot,” and when I was met with a puzzling gaze, I added, “I live in my head most times; it's a beautiful place to be.” I didn't think much of my response then because I thought my ability to daydream as a form of escape was this special gift bestowed upon me. A gift that made it possible for me to navigate hurdles by blocking out the external and focusing on my construed version of reality. While this isn't typically bad, it's also not the superpower I thought it to be. The human mind is a weapon, and we are commonly encouraged to create an adequate environment in our heads. I failed to realize that creating a sustainable environment is different from building a faux reality.
The realization that daydreaming had become my coping mechanism was lost on me until I saw the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The 2013 movie can be described as one of the most inspiring, thought-provoking, uplifting, and motivating movies of the decade. What struck me most in this movie was the character of Walter Mitty, beautifully portrayed by the talented Ben Stiller. Walter was a chronic daydreamer, a relatable character, and watching his daydreams play out and the effects on his life in the real world hit a little close to home. Walter’s dreams were vivid and elaborate; he could drop into them at any point, and they spanned from him being a superhero to an adventurer. Walter would spend considerable time lost in his world of thoughts and become oblivious to the conversations and happenings around him. In more than one instance, Walter has to be physically nudged back to consciousness before his mind wanders back to reality. A noteworthy observation for me was the personas Walter developed for himself in these daydreams. The characters he adopted were in polarity to who Walter was in reality. In the real world, Walter was an introvert, and his life almost felt like a moving train with him never quite making any substantial stops and just riding this endless one-way journey.
I will never dispute the power a dream plays in motivating us as human beings and opening our minds to a world of possibilities and opportunities. Dreams have been the bedrock that has formed the foundation of many historical advancements. However, a daydream is not the same as a dream. While a dream sees an opportunity, a daydream sees elusion. The unfortunate reality is, that all a daydream provides is an escape—and even worse, a mental escape—because the physical remains as is, and regardless of how far or wide the mental reaches, it can never alter the physical. Eventually, the mind returns to find the physical right where it always has been, and the world carries on as it was. It's impossible to deny the temporary gratification daydreams can provide, but as with all illusions, it fades eventually.
Maladaptive daydreaming robs us of our power to exist in the present because we're always elsewhere. It robs us of our time; minutes are wasted away in a bid to concoct the perfect false reality. These daydreams dangle the possibility of utopia in our faces and steal away our power to find beauty in the imperfection of reality. To draw on the character of Walter Mitty yet again, in this movie, Walter nursed the biggest crush on his coworker, Cheryl, but could never quite muster the courage to ask her out. Whereas in his imagination, he had saved her dog from a burning building, he had multiple conversations with her, and she had even described him as everything she wanted in a man—“Adventurous, Brave, and Creative” (ABC)—all the while, Cheryl barely even knew Walter’s last name in reality. The adverse effects of Walter’s constant escapism were also evident in other aspects of his life, impeding his goals to travel and see the world and never bringing them to actualization in the decades he worked at his company.
While this realization wasn't completely lost on Walter, it isn’t until a photograph goes missing at his job under his supervision that he steps out on a journey to find it. The quest to find the photograph forces Walter out of the comfort he had always found in the familiar. Throughout the movie, we see Walter become the “ABCs” that he thought only existed in the fictitious personas he had designed for himself. Eventually, Walter finds a balance, the midpoint that exists between the inner life and the outside world. He learns to be at peace with his thoughts but does not allow himself to be swept up in them or let them rob him of his courage to live in the real world. In line with this, Walter eventually finds his voice and the ability to express himself; he confronts his boss at work, asks Cheryl out on a date, and learns to live life intentionally. Even more commendable is when, towards the end of the movie, Walter almost slips back into a daydream while in a cab but manages to consciously draw himself out of it and force his focus on reality.
The truth is that while daydreaming provides a momentary escape, we still have to face reality eventually, and the negative effects of the evasion are far worse. We often spend hours building castles in the air and constructing this inward experience only for the reality of life not to play out in the way we had concocted, and the aftermath of this becomes far more depressing than if we’d managed to navigate reality in the first place. Maladaptive daydreaming provides little to no reward for solving the problem at hand. The sooner we learn to escape the grips of these daydreams, through mindfulness training and a conscious effort to find alternative ways to process negative emotions rather than evade them, the quicker we harness the ability to really and truly live life.
‘To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life’
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Enjoyed reading this!