Part II: Things you are and things you are not

You’ve probably heard that it’s surprisingly common for some people to have rape fantasies. Does it mean that those people are really attracted to it in real life and that they feel like acting it out? Hell no. Introduce this thought to them in real life and they will most likely be very disturbed.

That’s fantasy for you. Far-fetched scenarios and events that you think you want but you actually don’t. Majority of those people fortunately know that their fantasies are just fantasies whereas maladaptive daydreamers think that events in their daydreams are mirroring their real needs and that they cannot be happy unless they came true. This is the first misconception that you’ve possibly imposed on yourself. Ask yourself: what is it that you really want? Break down your daydreams to pieces and analyze them bit by bit. Is it people from your daydreams? Events? Adventures? Is it feelings you experience there? If one by one came true and appeared in your real life, which one would finally satisfy your needs?

There are many types of fantasies just as there are many different reasons for their existence. Some are superficial wishful thinking while others contain very precious salvaged parts of you, so to discard MD as a cowardly attempt to rewrite things that didn’t go the way you planned is an oversimplification. MD is how you would like things to be but it’s also how things would have been hadn’t you fallen somewhere along the way.

Narcissistic daydreams centering on idealized self, success, power, intelligence and need for attention serve to delude and distract you from the fact that you can’t deal with your own weaknesses. Nothing deep here. They are superficial and have no other purpose than to get your wounds licked. You already know that having narcissistic fantasies doesn’t mean you’re a narcissistic ego maniac with control issues – it means you’re insecure. Work on these insecurities in real life, do things without being held back by your own and other people’s expectations and daydreams like this vanish. Don’t try to fix yourself by force. Trying to mimic your daydream characters by doing things they do will only give you a false sense of security and further hold you back. You sincerely have to accept and acknowledge your own flaws, you have to accept yourself as fucked up as you are and then start dealing with insecurities and flaws one by one, correcting them when possible, accepting when not. Same goes for need for attention; it means there are so many things you would like to communicate yet somehow always end up being silent. For every word you wanted to say but chose not to because you were doubtful of yourself, the energy builds up, feeding your daydreams and starving your soul. Speak up, don’t bottle things up. If you want to shout at the world that you hate it, then shout and make sure you are heard. Until this urge is satisfied in reality, a part of you will always want to wallow in self-soothing daydreams and no medication or trigger avoidance will stop this. You will be surprised how easy these fantasies are to break once you have dealt with insecurities. When you sort yourself out, you will find yourself reaching the level of confidence of the idealized you. While you may never be in control of real life like in your daydreams, you can be fully in control of yourself. And that’s enough for happiness.

If issues that lie beneath and feed your MD are more severe, chances are that you are broken to the point of feeling like you have no personality and exist nowhere, robotically observing life without participating in it.

MD begins where self breaks. Something had to butcher your sense of self so hard for MD to take over your life. Your daydream characters are your last attempt to latch yourself onto something concrete before you completely disappear. You are extending your existence through them in ways sometimes unclear even to you, you live off them. It’s as if you severed a part of yourself, dissociated it completely from your own identity so that not even you can recognize it and transferred it to daydream characters because that is the only place where it can continue to survive when you no longer can and when everything else is falling apart. It’s pretty parasitic way of living but it is doing an excellent job of keeping you alive.

Selflessness. That is why it’s so easy for you to become other people – i.e. daydream characters. You take form of whatever pours into you because there is no solid sense of self that would make your identity firm and separate you from them. This holds particularly true for daydreamers who fantasize about fictional characters from books or TV shows without ever involving themselves. It may feel like you aren’t involved at all but one of those characters usually has something very personal to you which allows you to merge your identity with theirs. Maybe, if the things hadn’t gone wrong, you would have been very similar to them. Maybe, you are attracted to something they have that was supposed to be but somehow didn’t end up yours. And you want it back, that’s why you are so drawn to them. Because you perceive your identity as flawed, you abandon it and conflate with one of those characters without ever even noticing. Because if you noticed, it’d backfire, you’d be aware of yourself, the very same self that you despise and try desperately to keep out of the way. If you can only fantasize about romance in third person, using two characters without involving yourself, this signals that you are failing to connect the feeling of love to your own identity, so you eventually end up transferring it to your characters and experiencing it through them. This level of dissociation speaks volumes on how much your sense of self is actually broken. But if you can feel love through your characters, then you are capable of feeling love of identical intensity in real life even though you may have convinced yourself otherwise. It’s not emotions that are foreign to you, it’s you who are foreign to yourself. How can you connect emotionally to other people when you can’t even connect to yourself?

Fantasies like this are oftentimes extremely profound and don’t revolve around superficial urges such as need for attention and narcissistic desires – instead, they are more existential in nature, usually relative to deeper issues like loneliness, love and wanting someone to acknowledge your existence and they’re not something to be disposed of. You usually engage in these types of daydreams in order to come in touch with these detached parts of yourself that have been shunned in real life for so long that you even forgot they existed. That spontaneous person you’re in your daydreams isn’t a lie. That could be you. That would have been you had you properly developed.

I’ll repeat what I said in previous post. You aren’t running away from reality, you’re running away from yourself. But is this self you are fleeing from really you?

No.

It’s not even a self. It’s a blend of negative emotions that permeate your existence and deceive you into believing you are what you are not. It’s a void where you don’t get to exist. One part of your real self is missing, asleep, dead, you name it, and it will be asleep as long as depression messes with you. The other part is stuck somewhere in daydreams and only chooses to express itself there. Give them up and you will be giving up yourself. This is why abandoning dream world hurts as if somebody tore your heart in two. You wouldn’t be giving up just your false comfort but also a part of your own soul, which tells you that simply abandoning feelings of the dream world by ignoring them isn’t correct either.