Eventually, Zooey decided to leave the firm for another job. As the two of them were saying goodbye, Zooey suddenly confessed to Jeremy that she had been fantasizing about him over the last several years. To his surprise, Jeremy found himself excitedly blurting out that he had actually been fantasizing about her too. At that juncture Zooey reached out to him to say goodbye, kissing him on the lips.
Despite having breached his own boundaries, Jeremy rationalized to himself that he was still safe, since he had informed Zooey that he was happily married.
In this confusing zone where the two worlds blend, acting in ways previously contained to the fantasy world can feel instinctive. Jeremy found himself drawn into in an excited, infatuated state that felt irresistible. Following the farewell incident, he and Zooey exchanged various texts and phone calls, a new occurrence.
Therapy focused on helping Jeremy access a more integrated sense of himself that included his mature, adult self and the values that were important to him.
He began to recognize that despite his words to the contrary to Zooey, he was unconsciously encouraging the continuation of a fantasy between them, even knowing that Zooey secretly hoped that they might be together some day. Jeremy became aware of how easily he could hurt Zooey and, in the process, blindly destroy his marriage and family — which, to him, mattered more than anything. Therapy brought into focus aspects of himself that had been compartmentalized and thereby blocked from experience.
Soon Jeremy began to feel scared — a positive sign that reality was starting to intrude. With a greater awareness of internal conflict and fear, Jeremy gained the strength and perspective to end contact with Zooey. Upon doing so, Zooey suddenly showed another side of herself. That shattered the fantasy entirely and catapulted Jeremy into full-blown reality.
Fantasies can provide a reliable source of comfort and stimulation. The third acknowledged my pain and put me on Prozac, but that did nothing except make me nauseous and, frankly, a little scared.
What if my characters evaporated? In college, I spent my few non-daydreaming hours searching psychology databases, trying to find any evidence of someone like me. I made a lot of close friends and had a few boyfriends, but I found it tiring to keep up with their conversations while watching TV in my mind. I found myself gladly leaving their company even if I was still in their presence to visit my plotlines. I made it through Harvard Law School, in part by imagining myself teaching my television characters about torts and stipulations.
No one else knew how hard and exhausting it was to merge my coursework with my fantasy world. Finally, in my mids, worn out by trying to balance my job as an advocate for domestic-violence victims with the shows in my mind, I found relief. A psychiatrist prescribed me Fluvoxamine, an antidepressant known to help with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which had affected some members of my family. It worked wonders in controlling the daydreaming.
Had I finally found someone who was just like the childhood version of myself? I was amazed to learn that I wasn't alone. The paper examined six subjects who daydreamed excessively. Unlike me, they were victims of abuse and were unable to function well socially or in the workplace. I toss [it] in the air. This repetitive monotone movement helps me concentrate on the fantasy.
After discovering this research, I convinced my psychiatrist, Jesse Rosenthal, to write an anonymous case study of me, working with the Hunter College researcher Cynthia Schupak.
I had to wean myself off my medication temporarily in order to allow Malia Mason, a researcher at Columbia University, to administer a fMRI to show which parts of my brain were active during daydreaming. The test showed great activity in the ventral striatum, the part of the brain that lights up when an alcoholic is shown images of a martini.
To her, it suggested that I not only got pleasure from daydreaming, but that the behavior was reinforced, becoming even more pleasurable in a feedback loop, much as you'd see with a drug addict. In I worked with Schupak again, this time as a co-author on a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and Cognition.
Looking at 90 excessive daydreamers, we found that 80 percent of them reported kinesthetic activity such as moving in circles, pacing, or rocking while they daydreamed. Twenty-three of the subjects said they had sought counseling for their fantasizing, but none had found a medical professional who took his or her problem seriously. The people in our study are troubled by their habit and their inability to control it. This, more than anything else, defines maladaptive daydreaming.
They also scored higher than those engaged in a highly demanding task—such as mentally rotating shapes—during the interval. Allowing our mind to ramble during a moderately challenging task, it seems, enables us to access ideas not easily available to our conscious mind or to combine these insights in original ways.
Our ability to do so is now known to depend on the normal functioning of a dedicated daydreaming network deep in our brain. Like Facebook for the brain, the default network is a bustling web of memories and streaming movies, starring ourselves. Louis, who first described the network in It consists of three main regions: the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex.
The medial prefrontal cortex helps us imagine ourselves and the thoughts and feelings of others; the posterior cingulate cortex draws personal memories from the brain; and the parietal cortex has major connections with the hippocampus, which stores episodic memories—what we ate for breakfast, say—but not impersonal facts, such as the capital of Kyrgyzstan. It was not until , however, that cognitive psychologist Malia Fox Mason, now at Columbia University, discovered that the default network—which lights up when people switch from an attention-demanding activity to drifting reveries with no specific goal—becomes more active when people engage in a monotonous verbal task, when they are more likely to mind wander.
In an experiment, participants were shown a string of four letters such as R H V X for one second, which was then replaced by an arrow pointing either left or right, to indicate whether the sequence should be read forward or backward. When one of the characters in the string appeared, subjects were asked to indicate its position first, second, third or last, depending on the direction of the arrow.
The more the participants practiced on each of the four original letter strings, the better they performed. They were then given a novel task, consisting of letter sequences they had not seen before. Activity in the default network went down during the novel version of the test. Subjects who daydreamed more in everyday life—as determined by a questionnaire—also showed greater activity in the default network during the monotonous original task.
In Smallwood, Schooler and Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia published the first study to directly link mind wandering with increased activity in the default network. The researchers scanned the brains of 15 U. Each was asked to push a button when he or she saw any number except three. In the seconds before making an error—a key sign that an individual's attention had drifted—default network activity shot up.
Periodically the investigators also interrupted the subjects and asked them if they had zoned out. Again, activity in the default network was higher in the seconds before the moment they were caught in the act.
Notably, activity was strongest when people were unaware that they had lost their focus. Defects in the default network may also impair our ability to daydream. A range of disorders—including schizophrenia and depression—have been linked to malfunctions in the default network.
In a study neuroscientist Peter Williamson of the University of Western Ontario found that people with schizophrenia have deficits in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-reflection. In patients experiencing hallucinations, the medial prefrontal cortex dropped out of the network altogether.
Although the patients were thinking, they could not be sure where the thoughts were coming from. On the other hand, those who ruminate obsessively—rehashing past events, repetitively analyzing their causes and consequences, or worrying about all the ways things could go wrong in the future—are well aware that their thoughts are their own, but they have intense difficulty turning them off. These ruminators—who may repeatedly scrutinize faux pas, family issues or lovers' betrayals—have trouble switching off the default network when asked to focus mentally on a neutral image, such as a truckload of watermelons.
They may spend hours going over some past incident, asking themselves how it could have happened and why they did not react differently and end up feeling overwhelmed instead of searching for solutions. Experimental studies have shown that positive distraction—for example, exercise and social activities—can help ruminators reappraise their situation, as can techniques for cultivating mindfulness that teach individuals to pay precise attention to activities such as breathing or walking, rather than to thoughts.
Yet people who daydream excessively may have the same problems ignoring their thoughts once they get going.
Indeed, extreme daydreamers find their private world so difficult to escape that they describe it as an addiction—one as enslaving as heroin.
Since childhood, Rose has conjured up countless imaginary characters in ever changing plots. The deeper she delved into her virtual world, though, the more distressed she became. Essentially, we daydream about escaping our reality. Living in a fantasy or always daydreaming about positive change is one of the more subtle effects of trauma , but it can be toxic to our health and lead to:. Daydreaming itself is not problematic.
We all do it, and it can help us exercise our imagination and explore our private responses to life and its events.
However, as is the case with any trauma symptom, and any substance or behavioural addiction, daydreaming and fantasy is problematic when it becomes a compulsion and interrupts our normal daily well-being and functioning. When you are only daydreaming about a different future but not doing the actions or tasks that will get you there, then daydreaming is maladaptive. Below are some common ways in which we fantasise or daydream about our lives changing for the better.
Many of us engage in rescue fantasies, particularly in romantic relationships, where we believe we can be a knight in shining armour for our romantic interest and save them from their situation, to be praised and seen as a hero in our fantasy world.
Both types of rescue fantasy can be harmful and counterintuitive to authentic, healthy intimate connections. The fantasy may seem to come true in the short-term.
Still, over time as our situations change we may continue to place these heroic expectations on ourselves or on our partners — these are often unrealistic or impossible to live up to. Over time, the need or desire to replay that fantasy returns, and the person we once believed we saved, or saved us, seems to change and we seek other people to play these characters in a vicious and destructive fantasy cycle.
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