re: daydreaming
Tags: Daydreaming, Depression, Self, Narcissism, Psychology

I am constantly wearing makeup — eyeliner always and my hair down too. I talk as though I am having successfully rich conversations full of intellect and wit. In my mind, I come across as desirable, lovable, and even beautiful. People think highly of me. This however is not happening at all. This occurs when I am alone, fluffing up my self-image, and merely imagining that I am talking to people. It is softly megalomanic. I look into the mirror and stare at myself as though I am staring at someone else, and they stare back at me. I imagine their thoughts, their body movements, where their eyes look as they are staring back at me. As I stand in my kitchen, I imagine a person sitting across the room gazing at me as I go about doing things. With every single movement I make, I envision them, I feel them watching me carefully. I am afraid to talk out loud out of the fear that someone, often the person I am daydreaming about, will hear me entertaining and encouraging these embarrassing thoughts. Years of my life have been overcome by this mental imagery, these ruminating, obsessive, and borderline psychotic (a term I am using unprofessionally) thoughts. I have been isolated for a while, and I have lost a lot because of this isolation. Importantly, I have missed out on the exposure to social reception and the adjustments one may make to their social behavior due to responses from others. I have allowed myself to miss out on the consequential privilege of learning about people through interacting face to face. Consequently, I am full of regret and sadness.

Every time I am in front of a mirror, I escape into my own eyes, almost like a tunnel to an inner fantastical domain of mental imagery overflowing with dopamine. Chimeric thoughts! Don Quixote is my hero! My little vanity mirror sits on my desk as I try to write a paper for my philosophy class, but I must remove it to prevent myself from getting lost within the me/imagined people I visualize with the help of the mirror. I then immediately put the mirror back on my desk as I cannot resist the magnetic pull, the pleasure filled distraction, like an addiction of sorts. Narcissistic? Maybe. Though as I type now, I think of a mesmeric person. I think of them as though they might be thinking of me, but I know rationally it is not likely. When I wake up in the morning, having slept in my eyeliner to make myself appear cuter in the morning, I take out my mirror and look at myself imagining that someone else can see me. I imagine them being attracted to me, telling me I am beautiful, wanting to be with me forever, as sickly as that sounds to the me in reality. I pretend, exercising thoughts of me being flirtatious, completely different than what I am now, and leading this happy and successful life. For around 60 percent of the time I am looking in the mirror however, I am simultaneously observing how disgusting I actually look, how wrong it is for me to even be thinking about thinking about these things. I stand in front of the mirror, dressed up, playing guitar and singing as though people are watching me. I imagine their thoughts, them admiring me, them seeing me as this entity capable of changing the way they look at life. Half of the time, I stop what I am doing to pretend like I am in the middle of a conversation with someone. And much of the time, I find that I am giving myself advice as though it is someone else who is giving me advice. This daydreaming takes over my life.

I have been diagnosed with depression, OCD, a lot (!) of anxiety, and have experienced delusion-fueling hypomania. Nothing gets rid of these thoughts, these encapsulating daydreams. I have learned that I cannot do anything, think anything, or feel anything without imagining other people watching me experience it, judging me, and deciding if I am worthy. But do we all do this, perhaps even subconsciously? Oddly, the imaginary scenarios that I would place myself in put me in high states of anxiety to the point where I would start shaking as I imagine myself living out the imaginary thoughts. I imagine all these eyes on me, but I am 98 percent sure no one is actually watching me. I see these imaginary scenarios and conversations also as practice for potential real ones.

I don’t tend to accept the term “maladaptive daydreaming” as I believe that daydreaming is part of a much larger issue often existing with other mental health conditions such as depression, OCD, and ADHD. But for now, as so many of us experience a submersion within a carefully constructed world of dreams and hypnosis, I say that we both resist and hesitantly embrace the colliding comfort within our own quixotic psyche.