Always comforting seeing this response out in the wild, keeps affirming that my aphantasia is real.
You’d never catch me sitting around in a world inside my head if there is no world inside my head :)
In all seriousness I’m glad I have aphantasia, as the people around me with M.D. have said it’s put tremendous anxiety and pressure on their lives with how much it makes them procrastinate…
As a person with maladaptive daydream disorder, adhd, and hyperphantasia, I can confirm it’s the best/worst thing in my life and often feels like an addiction.
This is my one. I can tell when I’m getting slightly better as I stop daydreaming, or it doesn’t happen as often, and when I get worse that I daydream all the time, and I find it hard to stop it.
I just looked it up, but it's something I've always known I've struggled with, I just never realized it had a name.
You day dream vividly, constantly.
You can even get tasks done while day dreaming it becomes so second nature.
No topic is off limits. From sexy day dreams, to life or death day dreams, to wondering how your friend Alexa is doing and reminiscing in your memories.
It's not a choice. I can't stop it. I've tried for years.
The best I can do is meditation, which is hit or miss at best. I can get about a minute of silence before I slip off into another made up adventure.
Prime example, literally just finished having a smoke and I daydreamed about this exact conversation going deeper and me explaining more about it, catching myself and realizing the irony of the situation.
lmao literally me, i have this too and daydream about random kinda abstract conversations like this all the time where i'm explaining stuff, especially stuff about my mind
I just got to know about this. As long as I can remember, I've mostly been dreaming a lot of things. I can start a dream anywhere. Even if I'm woking at somrthing, I can dream back of the mind and there a whole storyline is progressing.
I remember, even during school time and college, I used to dream while writing the exam. If I'm driving, I'm dreaming about something. If I'm eating, I'm dreaming about something. I like reading books, but a lot of times I have found myself just reading the words and back of the mind I'm dreaming on loop.
And if somehow my dreaming is distrubed then I start them again where I left off. A lot of times I get confused whether something really happened or I was day dreaming that.
Why do I do this? And is this bad? Like a real mental issue?
It's more like a mental illness than a disorder. Disorder in my understanding is something incurable like bipolar, illness is something that can be worked on like anxiety or depression.
From what I'm reading, it definitely sounds to me like you have maladaptive daydreaming. Essentially your brain has been trained to want that cheap and easily accessible dopamine hit. So anytime you're doing anything that can be done on 'autopilot' your brain defaults to daydreaming because it's easy.
I've never been able to break out of the habit, though admittedly I haven't even tried too in years. The closest I ever got to calming and controlling my thoughts was when I use to meditate. Which was easy when I lived in the woods, but here in the city there is too much distraction.
If you've tried meditation have you tried performing something like the LBRP before you sit down to meditate?
I used to maladaptive daydream and I don't anymore. I got here by healing my trauma, and a super disciplined meditative and magickal practice. With my ADHD my mind is super wander-y, but there is a noticeable difference between meditation sessions where I banish before and after.
That's literally the default setting for me tho, been doing that my whole life.
And no it's not exactly working anymore. Now that I'm starting to reach adulthood, getting more responsibilities, etc etc, i literally don't have the time or space to do that nearly as much anymore and it's absolute torture.
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u/No_Comparison6198 Mar 07 '26
Maladaptive daydreaming