During the month of June I drove right past my street at least four times on my way home from the grocery store. My eight-year-old daughter, who is no stranger to this phenomenon, would say something like, “Mom! You passed our street again! Did you leave the planet?” While that sounds like a snarky, rhetorical question, the answer actually is yes: I did leave the planet. In fact, I leave the planet several times a day, and she’s just lucky I missed our street only four or five times last month.
I’ve just learned that there is actually a personality disorder that accounts for my behavior: Maladaptive Daydreaming. According to daydreamingdisorders.webs.com, the term was recently coined by Dr. Eli Somer, Ph.D. I’ve borrowed a quote from the website to dispel fears that I’m highly delusional:
“It’s important to note at this point that people with this problem are not psychotic; we DO NOT confuse fantasy and reality. We are quite aware (sometimes painfully aware) of the difference between the two. We know what is real and what is not. This illness is instead like a cross between a compulsive habit and a severe addiction.”
I actually have a fairly minor case of Maladaptive Daydreaming as it turns out. Many people are incapable of holding down a job or maintaining a relationship as they dream the majority of their lives away. (I am lucky that my part-time job does not demand intense focus; I have become quite adept at transcribing recorded conversations with amazing accuracy while thinking about something else.) However, I am prone to slipping into a daydream as soon as I get in the car or start listening to music. And, I’m sorry to say, if a conversation starts to lag, I’m afraid my eyes may glaze over as my responses become monosyllabic. Yes, I’ve left the planet again.
Before I became a writer, daydreaming was just that. I spent a large portion of my childhood imagining fantasy worlds and characters. When at liberty, I would act them out, but at school or in the company of adults I was regulated to keeping it all inside. But now I’ve found an outlet for all of that dreaming, and I’m actually making money (slowly) doing it!
The problem is, it’s hard to control. I can’t, for example, set aside an hour or two for scheduled daydreaming. It spills over into every aspect of my life, and is now my number-one occupational hazard of being a fantasy writer. My husband has to repeat things (and gets really annoyed with me), I miss turnoffs, I neglect housekeeping and prefer staying in to socializing, all because my brain will sneak in mental writing every chance it gets. Until I discovered Benadryl, bedtime was the worst. I’d stay up half the night writing in my head, oftentimes getting up at 3:00 a.m. to nail down a scene.
There are other occupational hazards that aren’t quite so consuming, but are equally irritating to my friends and family. When I’m on a good writing jag, I have an internal narrator that insists on narrating everything I observe and do in literary prose. Nothing, much to my husband’s chagrin, is sacred, even sex. While I don’t actually write any of it out for anyone to read, when he remembers that I have the tendency to do it, it makes him self-conscious. I have also betrayed secrets and exploited bizarre personality quirks of friends and family in my novels. Best not to tell me, for example, that your mother-in-law is bulimic and vomits loudly every night after dinner while everyone pretends nothing happened. (That’s in one of my WIPs). Oh, I also have a highly visual imagination and have absolutely no control over the fact that I must visualize everything. So again, unless you want me to imagine your latest sexual exploit, better keep mum.
While I’m on the subject, I might as well apologize for those times I preferred imagining movie trailers for my novel adaptation instead of talking to you because you happened to put a movie score in the car’s CD player. I’m sorry I made an intense study of your mouth while you were eating as I searched for the perfect metaphor to describe the way you chew sideways. I’m sorry our latest sexual encounter turned into a pirate kidnapping in a bad Harlequin, and I’m sorry I left the bag of food at the Burger King drive-through window. Again. I’m sorry your mother’s gigantic mole was featured in my latest novel, and that I couldn’t help our daughter with her homework on Sunday nights because Game of Thrones was on. I’m sorry that all of my emails contain a pedantic showcase of my extensive vocabulary while yours are ripped to shreds by my inner proofreader. I’m sorry the house if full of dragons and fairies, that your family thinks I’m weird, and that sometimes I awaken in the middle of the night convinced I have magical powers.
The thing of it is, I just can’t help it. It comes with the territory.
