Kirk Allen and Maladaptive Daydreaming

We all daydream and many of us funnel our imagination into creative acts. But what happens when these exercises overpower us? In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the strange case of nuclear physicist Kirk Allen, whose imagination may have gotten the better of him -- and his psychoanalyst. Dive into the world of cooperative illusions and maladaptive daydreaming. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with our second episode about the story of
Kirk Allen, or at least based on the story of

(00:23):
Kirk Allen. Yeah, the story of Kirk Allen being a
recurring element, but ultimately we're talking about, you know, imagination,
We're talking about daydreams. We're talking about how we try
to objectively understand the universe even as more subjective narratives
are presented to us, narratives like UFOs or demons, etcetera,

(00:45):
or traveling into the future and being a space lord exactly. Now,
if you haven't heard the last episode, you should probably
go and check that one out first, where we tell
the whole story of Kirk Allen. We're gonna be following
up on some of the threads from it and this
one and pursuing some research on the idea of malad
active day dreaming, because the idea with Kirk Allen is that, essentially,
the short version is you had a guy with a

(01:07):
with a very important job, like a nuclear physicist for
a government institution, that was daydreaming so much that it
became a problem that his employers said, we want you
to go talk to a professional about this. Now, the
story goes, at least as it's presented by his therapist,
who was writing later and fictionalizing elements of the story,
both to protect the identity of the patient and as

(01:29):
far as we know, maybe maybe not also embellishing the
story to make it a better story. We don't know,
But the story goes that kirk Allen the pseudonym for
this patient, that he was referred to Robert Linden, or
the therapist, and that Lindener became so involved in kirk
Allen's beliefs that he could travel into the future and
in his mind and be a space lord and go

(01:51):
from planet to planet and explore all these technologies and
galactic civilizations, that he got so involved in that that
he started to believe it himself. And then it took
kirk Allen admitting that he made the whole thing up
and didn't actually believe any of it, to snap the
therapist out of believing in the delusion. And it makes
for a great story, like it illustrates like the power

(02:12):
the contagious nature of of of of a compelling fiction exactly.
But today we wanted to explore this other element of it.
So if we go with the story and we assume
that Kirk Allen never did believe any of what he
was saying, He never actually believed he was a space lord.
He just spent a lot of time fantasizing about it,

(02:33):
though he can tell the difference between his fantasy and reality.
What would that situation be. Imagine You've got this guy,
He's doing important nuclear physics or whatever other kind of
government research, and they can't keep him on task because
he's always thinking about how he's going to finish his
paper on the hyperdrive thruster that will get him to
tow St nine or whatever. Yeah. I mean, the cool

(02:55):
thing about all this, and I think ultimately the fascinating
part about it, is that we I think we can
all relate on some level to the you know, the
the attractive power of daydreaming. I mean we we we
all do it, and certainly we all did it when
we were children. Uh. I mean, I I've always had
a pretty active imagination as a kid. I was I

(03:17):
was content to pace around the backyard. I would generally
have a red or a green rubber band in my hand,
and I would just daydream a litany of imagined worlds,
inspired you know by typical things that are going to
inspire a kid, you know, the TV shows, movies, cartoons
and action figures, that sort of thing. And uh, and
I think everybody in my family probably thought I was

(03:37):
a little bit weird because of it, but they, you know,
they tolerated it, even only so they could continue to
make fun of me as an adult. And uh, you know,
then to their to everyone's credit, they encouraged my creative
activities later on in life that employed much of the
same energy, just without the rubber band and all the pacing. Um,

(03:57):
I guess maybe I still do some of the pacing.
But you do the pacing if you're not noticed. Yeah, well,
I you know, it's it's good for one to get up,
um all the time during work, not trying to call
you out. I paced two. Well like for well, one
thing I do now is I I do a lot
of swimming, and while I'm swimming, I am inevitably doing
some form of imaginative thoughts, some sort of daydreaming I'm

(04:19):
thinking about, say, uh, you know, the fiction podcast that
I'm putting together here for how stuff works and sort
of plotting that out. Uh, it's and it's all sort
of an experiment in like constructive daydreaming. Right, if I'm
lucky enough to visit a beach, that's the kind of
thing that occupies my mind on long walks, like I

(04:40):
I love those times in my life when I'm able
to not worry about the future, you know, or or
or you know, hang up over the past, and instead
just daydream about something uh, completely different. Well, as I've
said recently on the show, I think narrative is a
sacred retreat. But it's not just to sacred retreat when

(05:01):
you're reading the narratives of others. It's certainly a sacred
retreat when you're composing your own. Yeah. Now I have
to say that I'm I'm fortunate to have outlets for
my creativity and uh, and I'm also very fortunate that
daydreaming and imagination doesn't negatively impact my life and at
least currently uh and not everyone though, can make these claims. Yeah,

(05:24):
that that's a lot of what we're gonna be focusing
on today is like when when when it crosses that
line when daydreaming goes over the line and becomes something
not not so positive but more destructive to people's lives,
you know. Thinking about my own childhood, I can specifically
remember the process of trying to prolong or reinter dreams

(05:45):
that I had exited by waking up. Did you ever
have this experience? I remember, in particular this one dream
I had where I found a tunnel in my closet
and crawling through the tunnel, it went to a beach
where there was a girl there who was a friend
of mine, and she could turn into a fish, I think,

(06:07):
or a dolphin or a cat. But I could also
in this dream swing around on tree branches by using
a whip like Indiana Jones, And that was just the
coolest thing ever, because I loved Indiana Jones, and I
especially loved the swinging action. That sounds amazing. That that
reminds me of how I once had a Rocketeer dream.

(06:27):
Only once did I have this dream where I was
flying with the Rocketeers jet pack and it was just
so beautiful. It was just so breathtaking, and I've never
had that dream again. Yeah, I remember this just being
an overwhelmingly fun dream I had a morphin friend, and
I could swing around in tree branches like like Indiana Jones,
and for some reason it was just so fun that

(06:49):
when I woke up, I was like, oh, I've got
to get back there, and I tried to re enter it,
but I couldn't do it. I tried to go back
to sleep again and dream the same dream, but I
couldn't make myself And I remember trying really hard to
imagine having the same dream again while I was awake,
but I couldn't really do that either, at least not
with the same intensity. And I know this wasn't the

(07:10):
only time I tried to recreate a dream state while
I was awake. This is just one really vivid one
that I remember. And I think this impulse to try
so hard to imagine myself back into a dream sort
of is part of what led me to become interested
in fiction writing. Because while dreams always fade very quickly
in memory, even very vivid ones tend too if you

(07:30):
don't talk about them or write them down after you
wake up. Imaginary scenarios coded down in writing those are permanent,
and you can re enter them with full fidelity at
any time. You know your story reminds me a lot
of HP Lovecrafts, The dream Quest of Unknown Cats. I
don't know that it's it's a wonderful and imaginative tale,

(07:51):
very unlike most of his. It's one of his dream stories,
so it's it's it's more fantasy than horror, though it
has you know, the horror elements for sure. But the
basic idea is that a dream or a man dreams
a dream so beautiful that the gods, the elder beings
deny it to him, and hasked to go on a
quest to try and reclaim that dream. Whoa is it

(08:12):
beautiful or or sad and melancholy? That that's so much
of what life is is not not necessarily chasing a
new experience that you haven't had, but trying to recapture
a perfect experience, you remember, Yeah, it's true. It kind
of gets to the heart of the power of nostalgia, right. Yeah.
You know, in our previous episode, we we talked a

(08:32):
good a good deal about Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted
World because that was the context in which we read
this original story about Kirk Allen. Yeah, and uh and
and Sagan has a wonderful quote here just about fantasy
and reality that I wanted to read, He says, quote.
Out of all these contending propensities and child rearing practices,
some people emerge with an intact ability to fantasize and

(08:55):
a history extending well into adulthood of confabulation. Others grow
up believing that everyone who doesn't know the difference between
reality and fantasy is crazy. Most of us are somewhere
in between. That's a good point. I mean, I so
obviously somebody who is U two wrapped up in their

(09:15):
in their fantasies, in their own head, that person is
obviously going to be having trouble. And when you you
encounter somebody like that, you can often recognize it. But
I think equally, you don't trust somebody at the far
opposite end of the spectrum who just has no tolerance
for imagination. You know, you sometimes meet people like this.
Oh yeah, I saw a guy at um It was

(09:37):
a tiki bar in uh in, Hawaii, and he was
ordering a drink, probably a mind hie or something, but
he had specific directions for the servery. He said, he said,
bring me one of these, but no umbrellas, no fancy
mug just makes you basically make this drink as boring
as possible, no fun for me, no umbrellas, Like I

(09:59):
refuse to pretend that there's a tiny man living on
the surface of my drink that needs shade from the
sun exactly. It's like, why are you even here if
you're if you're not here to engage in in funny
umbrella drinks, that's a tiki bar. Heretic right there. But
let's come back to just the subject of day dreaming
and creativity. Robert you know who had some interesting thoughts

(10:20):
about daydreaming and creativity, Good old Sigmund Freud, who I
bet he did dr joy So he talked about this
in a nineteen o seven essay called Creative Writers in Daydreaming,
And I just want to preempt please do not take
this discussion as an endorsement in general of Freudianism. While
Freud is of course a very important figure to read
in the history of ideas, a lot of his influence

(10:42):
on psychology has given way too much more rigorous, more
explicitly science based practices. I think these days Freud is
more worth reading in the vein of thinking about him
as a kind of like philosopher or something. But so
Freud starts with one of those great questions that we
might sometimes think of as too simple bowl or too
fundamental to actually ask out loud. The Robert. You might

(11:03):
have heard this one before. Somebody knows you write fiction,
or they read one of your stories and they ask you, Robert,
where do you get your ideas? How do you think
up what to get the characters to say and to do?
Have you ever been asked this? Yeah, I've been asked
versions of this before. I've been asked this too. I

(11:24):
was actually asked it fairly recently, and it's always struck
me as a bizarre question because I thought, I don't know.
I would think the answer is obvious. It's like I
get ideas by using my imagination and imagining what the
character would do. But the fact that some people end
up asking this question of other people indicates that obviously,
not everybody has the same propensity for imagining fictional characters

(11:46):
and places and scenarios and all that. So to some
people it comes more naturally than it does to others.
I mean, I'm always reminded of the subject of a fantasia,
you know, the idea that not everyone can form mental images,
which doesn't directly relate to what we're talking about here,
but it's a reminder of just how different our brains
can be. So I can you know, see why someone

(12:07):
might not initially grasp how an imagined character uh comes
to speak or act uh, and they might find it
harder still to understand how these fictional characters that people
dream up may well think or act in ways that
the imagineer does not expect. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean, one of the things I noticed in writing

(12:28):
is that the process of creativity, at least for me,
is very highly uh shaped by the act of recording
the creative process. So it's like writing a story is
very different than just trying to think out a story
in my head. Once once it turns into words, then
you realize, oh, all this has got to change. Yeah.

(12:49):
I I often feel like I have two processes that
I'm working with. One is that that day dreaming while
I'm swimming laps or whatever. But then there's the process
of actually writing things, and things may change drastically, uh,
depending on the demands of that process. Just to point
out quickly, also before we move on, you mentioned the
idea that not everybody can form images in their head

(13:11):
as one possible uh factor affecting whether people can compose fiction.
But we've heard from people who are fiction writers who
have a fantasition. Know, yeah, I I don't. I bring
it up more as just an example of how our
brains are different. Not that it would would impact, it
would change, not it would change the way one composes fiction,
I think. But but yeah, certainly someone of the fantasia

(13:35):
can and and they do write fiction. They do, uh
come up with fabulous ideas. Um. But yeah, we we
we often fall into that trap of thinking that everyone
has a brain more or less like mine. Maybe it's
you know, maybe it's it's it's it's you know it.
Maybe it's more powerful than mine, or maybe it's not
as finely tuned as mine. But all our brains are
basically the same, and an example like a fantasia just

(13:57):
reminds you know, this is not the at all. Yeah,
you're exactly right. So Freud began by observing this idea
that not all brains are the same, and that not
all brains are the same in terms of ability to
be creative, to come up with creative stories, and specifically
for the purpose of this conversation. We are talking about
creativity in terms of like making up stories, not the
more generalized idea of creativity, right, which can well and

(14:21):
does entail things that are not like you know, literature
major creativity. I mean, certainly there is creativity within science,
there's creativity within programming, etcetera. There's creativity and getting a
piece of meat out of a cage trap exactly. But
no way, So we're talking about like coming up with ideas,
like creative storytelling and stuff. So so, Freud says, you know,

(14:43):
even non creative people do have some experience with the
thinking of creative writers. Even if you're one of these
people who asks how do you come up with your ideas? Well,
how do you know what the characters should do? These people,
Freud says, do have experience with that because it's in
the imagination based play of their childhood. Think back on
your childhood, what was it like to play pretend? And

(15:06):
he writes, quote, might we not say that every child
at play behaves like a creative writer, and that he
creates a world of his own, or rather rearranges the
things of his world in a new way which pleases him.
It would be wrong to think he does not take
the world seriously. On the contrary, he takes his play
very seriously, and he expends large amounts of emotion on it.

(15:30):
The opposite of play is not what is serious, but
what is real? Might we not say that every creative
writer is a giant baby? I'm kidding, well, I I
agree with that last part of what Freud says, because
play play is a departure from constraints, not a departure
from stakes. There's nothing in the world more serious and

(15:52):
important than what happens in a child's game. I'm sure
you know from experience. If the floor is lava, the
floor is lava. Yeah. Though, I have to say, play
is definitely a topic that demands its own episode at
some point. I mean, there's so much going on when
a child plays, even when an adult engages in play.
And then of course we have other mammals that engage
in play as well, especially when they're young. Totally true.

(16:14):
So Freud says that the creative writer just extends this
type of play into adulthood and then uses the help
of writing to record the play. Otherwise, the process is
very similar. The creative writer creates a world of fantasy
and then takes it very seriously by investing huge amounts
of genuine emotion into it, but keeps it separated sharply

(16:34):
from the constraints of reality. So what's happening here? Why
does the day dreamer or the fiction writer do this?
You know? Why does the play in the imagination happen?
And Freud notes something. He says, what's common to almost
every single work of fiction. Well, we gotta have a hero,
right exactly the song says we need a hero, right.

(16:56):
I'm holding out for a hero for Freudian reasons. There
now this. Obviously, there's all kinds of fiction out there
in the world today. There's experimental fiction and fiction that
breaks every rule in the book, right, but most fiction
still does abide by this. You've gotta have a hero
around which the interest of the story is centered and
to which the author wishes to engender the audience's sympathies.

(17:18):
And another thing he points out is that the hero is,
by necessity of the plot invulnerable. The reader can always
trust that the hero will not be killed in chapter two,
or else there would be no story, or at least
that's what it's like as an adult. I feel like
any time I get my son to watch any time
we introduce him to a new film. Um, he does

(17:40):
not realize that the main character is going to make
it to the end of a children's film. Man, Like,
I wish I could go back to that. That's amazing.
I know it's it's at once uh amazing and frustrating,
because on one hand it's like, wow, he is experiencing
this film with such raw uh you know, vulnerability and

(18:00):
the other and then on the other side, it's like,
I just want you to be able to watch Muana
and uh and with the with the family. We just
want to make it to the end of this movie.
It's just a Disney princess movie. We should be able
to handle it, don't you dare take that magic away
from him? That No, that's a beautiful thing. Oh my god,
I can't believe it. I remember what that was like

(18:20):
back before I understood all of the like cliches of
story structure, when every when, every narrative was a radical
surprise to me. Things aren't quite like that anymore, and
I and I wish I could return to that mind state.
But anyway, Sorry, going back to Freud, so Freud notices
that the hero is always invulnerable by necessity of the plot,

(18:42):
and also the hero enjoys unrealistic good fortune in like
love and romance. So Freud writes, quote, through this revealing
characteristic of invulnerability, we can immediately recognize his majesty, the ego,
the hero alike of every day dream and every story.
It's probably telling about the kind of fiction I read.

(19:03):
But I can't remember the last time I read something
where the protagonist had great fortune in love in romance,
I feel like, I feel like they're mostly having a
pretty bad time. Well, I think if you take the
long view, okay, when the stories resolve, there are a
lot of stories where people go through a lot of
tragedy and then in the end that everything comes out right.
All right, I'll get back to you on that. I'm

(19:24):
gonna do a full cataloging of of recent reads for that.
What's your Freudian analysis of the ar Scott Baker books
that everybody has a pretty tough time with relationships. For
starters is something about death drive maybe maybe anyway, So
ultimately Freud gets Freudian right. He says that both the
daydream and the act of creative writing, which are really

(19:45):
sort of one and the same, thing realized through different means.
He says these are the result of unconscious memories which
give rise to an unfulfilled wish, and the wishes then
fulfilled through the daydream or the act of creative writing,
but in a way that is tempered about the social
and moral restraints imposed by society. This obviously is you know,
classic Freudian kind of stuff. But you don't have to

(20:07):
give any credence to this repressed childhood memory part, which
is probably nonsense to appreciate. There may be some insight
in the earlier parts about drawing this connection between the
creative process and what's going on in daydreaming. Oh, by
the way, if anyone would want, anyone wants like a
deeper exploration of like early childhood trauma and Freudian ideas. Uh,

(20:28):
there's an older episode of stuff to blow your mind
about the work work of hr Geiger and some Freudian
explanations for his His visual style was Gieger or Freudian. Uh.
I don't think it was quite a Freudian, but at
least one major commentator on his work was and pointed
to a lot and basically the the death and birth imagery. Uh.

(20:52):
That that that weird. Uh, you know, bio mechanical synthesis
of things that are both the vibrantly alive and just
unredeemably dead. Interesting. You know, I can actually see a
redemptive arc of of Freudiani is um maybe not so
much as a as the best tool for for psychology,

(21:14):
but maybe as like a literary and artistic criticism school. Well, yeah,
Like it comes back to what you said earlier about
Freud being perhaps more useful today if you think of
him as a philosopher and I and I do think
there's something to his insight here, like drawing this connection
between daydreaming and the creative impulse in order and and
and appreciating that the story spinning impulse, whether it's in

(21:34):
creative writing or simple daydreaming, is psychologically important, and it
does in many cases fill some psychological need and provide
some psychological benefit. But as we're exploring today, can spill
over into territory that's clearly not beneficial, such as in
the case of Kirk Allen, like we were talking about earlier,

(21:55):
where it was interfering with his work enough that his
superior has got in touch with Lindner, or in many
cases of what has come to be known as maladaptive
day dreaming. And we will explore that more when we
come back from break. Thank thank alright, we're back. So
now adaptive now adaptive daydreaming. It seems pretty obvious, right,

(22:18):
daydreaming that is uh, that is that is maladaptive. That
is that is probably not having a good influence on
your life. Things are out of balance because of your daydreaming. Right.
It's a term coined by the Israeli clinical psychologist Elie Summer,
and Summer defines the term to mean quote, extensive fantasy
activity that replaces human interaction and or interferes with academic, interpersonal,

(22:41):
or vocational functioning. So essentially, it is fantasizing that interferes
with your life. And there's actually been kind of a
renaissance of attention to this subject just in the past
couple of years. Yeah, there's in particular, there's a there's
an excellent episode of the MPR podcast Invisibility. Uh have
you listened to in Visibilia? No? I haven't. Well, I

(23:03):
listened to a little clip from this episode, but that's all.
It's a wonderful series, and there's one episode in particular
that discusses the story of a forty nine year old
suburban mother who they referred to as em who's rich
in her world, becomes a secret addiction that she keeps
from her family. So she So it's not just that
she's escaping into her her day dreams, you know, while

(23:25):
she's driving to work, or while she's swimming laps or
what have you. Uh No, she's making up excuses and
cover stories to go off and dream in this world. Right. So,
so this is an adult living a mostly normal life,
but she engages in elaborate fantasies about space adventures and
saving the Earth and getting sucked into a black hole

(23:48):
and all this. And she's got fictional companions who are
her her fictional friends, and she sometimes does this for
multiple hours a day. And there's one part that I
found very moving where she mentions, one thing about these
fantasy worlds is that you know you're going to be
understood in them because all the characters are you. On

(24:09):
one hand, that's beautiful, but then I also I think
of like characters that I've created, and I feel like
most of them probably would not tolerate me. So I
don't know if they really would understand me or not.
You need to create more sympathetic characters. Probably so, probably so.
So you can hear just from that that you know
that she she can go to this place to be understood.
So it obviously serves some purpose for her. You know,
it helps her cope and it helps her feel better

(24:32):
in a way. But it also you know, she wonders
if this is doing more harm than good in her life, right,
because if if you have to spend all this time
in secret doing this thing that you keep secret from
your family, I mean this, this is generally not healthy
behavior and it's going to lead to a lot of
negative effects. So what does it mean for daydreaming to

(24:52):
become a problem, a real problem, on the level of
a disorder that people would want to seek professional help
to cure. Rob And I don't know if you share
this bias, but I feel like in reading about the subject,
one of the things that's been really hard for me
to get around is a bias I have to think
about day dreaming as a just inherently very good and

(25:14):
admirable thing. Yeah, I agree, because I, for one am
a daydream believer, so I'm gonna always side with the
daydream I was just looking at a meme on the
Internet that was like has a unicorn on it and
it says, don't quit your daydream I mean, and that's
supposed to be a whimsical but encouraging thing to say. Like,

(25:34):
I associate daydreaming with the character trait of imagination, which
most of us view is a good thing. I certainly do.
And think about this, Robert. Imagine you're picking up a
new novel and there's a young character in the story
who's introduced as always daydreaming, daydreaming through classes in school
or something. Do you expect this character to turn out

(25:55):
to be a hero or a villain. I'd say they
are either the hero, or they are going about to
be tragically transformed into the villain, or they're just an
introductory character that's going to be killed by a villainous
force before we move on to the actual protagonists. Well,
no matter what you're they're sympathetic at this. Yes, definitely,
day day dream nous is an inherently sympathetic trait. But

(26:17):
I think this is because we usually think about it
in several contexts. Number One, it's primarily an activity of
children and the young. Would you agree with that, Yes,
If nothing else, that is often seen as you know,
it's sort of a childlike quality, right Yeah. Number two,
I'd say it's usually done in a positive sense of
aspiration and ambition. Like in fictional narratives, daydreaming about a

(26:39):
different kind of life is often foreshadowing that that character
will actually later get to do those things that they
day dreamed about. Number three. At least in fiction, it's
usually grounded within an otherwise functional set of relationships and
behavior patterns. It's not usually presented as something that keeps
people from doing what's right or having relationships right there,
daydreaming is their escape from there, from from their daily troubles. Yeah,

(27:04):
and that's the fourth part. The fourth part is that
it's usually brought about by unfair external constraints, Like a
child is in an intellectually deadening grammar class and it
and it causes that child to say, it's our young
heroine to sit there dreaming about, you know, shooting a
bow off the back of a horse or about space
adventures because she's in this horribly boring, mind numbing scenario.

(27:27):
I certainly feel all of this in general, and so
this is this episode is certainly not to cast a
negative light on all forms of daydreaming, because there are
clearly lots of cases where daydreaming is great, but there
are also plenty of cases we've come to understand where
daydreaming goes beyond a harmless exercise of imagination and it
becomes a destructive obsession, causing harm to the dreamer and

(27:48):
to the people around them. Yeah. I mean, I'd say
if daydreaming prevents one from being present when one should
be present, or when one wishes to be present, then
could certainly be seen as a problem. You know, I
think it's one of those, Uh, it could be viewed
as one of those chains of iron, chains of gold situations, Right, Like,
if you're not present with a loved one due to

(28:10):
worries over past or future events. That's one thing, But
isn't it still just as bad as you if you're
half zoning out during a conversation with a loved one
because there's a space battle going on in your head.
It's a fantasy, much in the same way that many
of our worries are ultimately fantasies about things going wrong. Yeah,
that's a that's a form of daydreaming as well. Yeah,

(28:31):
coupled with say, fantasy is about say winning the lottery
or finding This is when I still do all the time.
I think it's from from watching various like kidnapping movies.
But I'll think, what if I happened upon a garbage
can and there's like a like a drop off of
money in the garbage and then I get to take
off with the money and not of course I won't

(28:52):
be killed by the hitmen or the kidnappers or what
have you. Uh, surely I'll get away with the money
I just found in the trash can. But it's a
stupid fantasy that's still like, uh, you know, I don't
dwell on it, but it still flies through my head
every now and then two or three times a week tops.
You find yourself checking garbage can sometimes. I mean I

(29:13):
don't actually dig in them, but I you know, I
don't go looking for the money. But for some reason
lean and peak in a in a sense like this,
just this stupid fantasy will will will rear its head
for just a moment, uh, without me even you know,
really thinking about it. One thing I find is obviously
media influences what kinds of things we daydream about. Uh,

(29:36):
did you notice a lot of people, including yourself during
say the late two thousands, when zombie movies were everywhere,
constantly thinking about the best place to get to defend
from a zombie attack. Oh yeah, I mean that just
that falls into sort of h worst case disaster fantasizing. Yeah,

(29:57):
it's like, oh, I'd want to be on top of
that building right there, and here's what I'd want to
have with me, And mercifully the zombie craze has has
somewhat died down. I think people are thinking about that
kind of thing. Less, I'm still wondering Freudian explanations to
the side, like why do we do that? What's going
on in our brains when we day dream? Like, so

(30:19):
you're just hanging out, maybe waiting to meet a friend
or something like that, and then you start thinking, like,
what would be the best building around here to defend
from a zombie attack? What's what's going on in your brain?
Then well, this actually brings us back to something we've
discussed on the show plenty of times before, the default
mode network. I was looking at a two thousand, seventeen
University of Cambridge study that found that the brain network

(30:42):
previously associated with daydreaming, that the default mode network also
seemed to play a role, an important role in allowing
us to perform tasks on autopilot. Autopilot so like when
you are say, unconstabed that like highway hypnosis kind of thing, yeah,
or I'm yeah doing the dishwasher, you know, or taking
taking clothes to the taking the laundry to the washing machine,

(31:05):
that sort of thing. Things you've done so many times
that you just kind of zone out and you're thinking
about space battles or the lottery or what have you. Um.
The researchers here were also very interested in this because
abnormal activity in the default mode network has been linked
to an array of disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit,

(31:26):
hyperactivity disorder, and disorders of consciousness. And this study in
particular found that the default mode network plays an important
role in allowing us to switch to autopilot once we
are familiar with a task. So it seems fitting that
the default mode network should emerge again in an episode
on Daydreaming. We've discussed it quite a bit in the past,

(31:48):
as as is, this is where we find so much
of the worry and anxiety that we seek to escape
through flow states. Um, you know, such as a creative
activity like of writing or or would carving or yoga
or anything like like this, um, as well as through
meditation or you know, some other kind of meditative activity.

(32:11):
The default mode network activity is also linked to difficulty
in sleeping in new environments. You know, it's just kind
of totally find this to be true. Yeah, So you
have just like this heightened narrative of things that have
gone wrong and things that might go wrong. And I
feel like myself especially, so much of my my life
comes down to trying to to turn that that the

(32:33):
volume down on that network. You never get a good
night's sleep the first time you're somewhere new. Yeah. Furthermore,
Daniel Koneman proposed in his book Thinking Fast and Slow
that we use two systems to make decisions, a rational
system for calculated decisions and a fast system for intuitive decisions.
And this Cambridge study argued that it's the latter system,

(32:54):
the fast system, that may be linked with the default
mode network. So it sounds as if dreaming is kind
of a it's kind of a mistake of cognition, right.
A byproduct of it, at any rate are predictive software
to envision not only extreme cases of joy or horror,
but impossible fantasies. Fantasies they may not even involve us,

(33:15):
you know. But that's now that's considering standard daydreaming, which,
as we've discussed, is extremely common. I mean, almost everybody
does it. Just to cite a couple of figures on that.
For one thing, in the book day Dreaming in nineteen
sixty six, Singer reported that nine percent of normal, non
clinical adults who were educated and living in the United

(33:36):
States day daydreamed at least every day. And so that
kind of thing happens most when the person is alone. Right,
you are, say, laying in bed at night, getting ready
to go to sleep, and you start to daydream. You imagine,
you know, scenarios, you imagine fantasies, Your mind wanders, oh wow,
well mind mind does it far more often than that? Well,
oh yeah, yeah, but I meant nine percent of people

(33:58):
at least do this one a day. Um, And there
there's some evidence that it happens even more often. There's
a really good article in the Atlantic from that I'll
come back to a few times in this episode, called
When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life by Jane Biggelson, and Tina
Kelly from its April and the authors there speak to
a University of Minnesota psychologist named Eric Klinger who has

(34:21):
done a lot of important research on mind wandering, fantasy,
and daydreaming, and Clinger says that quote, daydreaming accounts for
about half of the average person's thoughts, amounting to about
two thousand segments a day. Oh wow, that's that's quite
a lot. Does that match with your number? I mean,
try to think about how many times a day do
you find yourself daydreaming? I mean the the like, the

(34:45):
really critical way of putting this is that we are
off task like half the time? Right, Yeah, do you
ever find yourself daydreaming while you're sitting right here in
the podcast studio? And I'm talking it's generally less daydreamed.
I feel if my mind drifts during podcasting, it's more
like worry based, you know, like I mean a bad kind.

(35:10):
So but I'm not I'm I'm not going to think
about space battles because ultimately our show is the space
battle show. Like this, this is a this, this show
is an escape. So Robert, you're gonna make me cry,
warming my heart over here. But the podcast booth is
not airtight. The worries in the fear is still managed
to creep them. Well, obviously there's no way to totally

(35:33):
keep them out. And that's one thing. I mean, one
difference that I'm already seeing here is the difference between
the idea of fleeting mind wandering and moments of daydreaming.
I mean, if if a person is having about two
thousand segments of day dreaming a day, those can't last
very long, just by the math of time, right, I mean,

(35:53):
it's it's kind of like the money and the garbage
can like daydreams that are they're regular, but they're just
so flee eating that you you don't it's almost like
they're not even occurring. They're they're really just like background static.
But when we think back to the story of m
or to some of the people that we're going to
talk about in a minute, um, it's clear that they're
not just having like a moment of a fleeting day

(36:15):
dream that comes for a second and then goes and
then comes back a few minutes later and goes again.
They are having prolonged, involved, continuous fantasies that's spin out
at that that spin out stories that have some sense
of continuity and that they engage in in a sustained way.
So I think that's a kind of important and interesting difference,

(36:37):
and and maybe we can think more about that as
we go on. But I mean, one of the things
we should take away from this is that everybody day dreams.
Normal people do it quite a bit. There's nothing pathological
at all about daydreaming. So there's really nothing abnormal about
some amount of it, provided that it is really daydreaming
and not some form of hallucination or something like that.
I mean, normal daydreaming is a fantasy that subject can

(37:00):
clearly distinguish from reality. If you can't tell the difference
between your fantasy and reality, then something else is going on,
and you definitely have grounds for seeking a mental health
professionals help. Right, the situation with m is not that
she finds these things the daydream is reality. She just
prefers it to reality. But if it is really just
daydreaming clearly delineated from reality, it's also important that it

(37:24):
doesn't occur in a way that's injurious to your way
of life or to the lives of others around you.
And we'll come back to that in a bit. So
One of the things that's interesting about the recent attention
on maladaptive daydreaming is just the fact that we went
so long with so little psychological recognition of the possibility
that excessive daydreaming could be a disorder that caused suffering

(37:47):
in people's lives. Probably the first major work on maladaptive
daydreaming was in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy in two
thousand two, mentioned earlier by by Elie Summer, called maladaptive
daydreaming a qualitative inquiry, and Summer rites first about Freud's thoughts,
which we talked about earlier, that daydreaming is this attempted
solution to a deprivation state that you know, it's a

(38:08):
form of wish fulfillment that's moderated by all these constraints
that society puts on you. But then, of course the
idea developed. You've got Hartman and fifty eight saying that
maybe fantasies serve some kind of actual adaptive function in
the organism. You've got Eric Klinger, who we mentioned a
minute ago, talking about how often people spend fantasizing, or

(38:30):
how much time a day people spend fantasizing. Clinger said
he found in his research that most fantasies, including both
sleeping dreams and daydreams, primarily involve current concerns, you know,
stuff that you're thinking about right now. So like you're
probably more likely, you know, not dreaming about space adventures,
but about what's in your email, yeah, or perhaps say

(38:53):
your your evening plans, daydreaming about that or particular video
game or film you're looking forward to right yeah. Or
interpersonal conflicts that's a big one. How common is that
dream of I'm having an argument with Jeffrey finally, and
here's what I would really tell him. See now, this
is an area where I feel like it's still daydreaming,

(39:15):
but one might easily categorize it more as simply worrying
and rehearsing for strife. You know, That's what a lot
of what daydreaming is, and like imagining scenarios is a
way of thinking about what you should do. But people
when when they talk when they talk about daydreams sort
of that they're very positive spin on it, you know,
where they say, oh that that Dan, he's such a

(39:36):
he's such a daydreamer. Nobody's thinking, oh that Dan, he's
just always trying to think up what he would say
if he had the courage to, you know, confront his
boss or something. Right, Yeah, that's that's the good dan.
The dan we like is the one who's daydreaming about
swash buckling on Mars and you know, flying flying around
the ridges of Phobos. The dan you do not like

(39:57):
is the one who's thinking, like, here's what I should
have said to Jeffrey. I should have told him that.
But I know that is a common thing. I know
people all the time or thinking about either what they
would say if they had the guts to, or what
they should have said in that argument they had yesterday,
earlier today, and that at least it can be in
a in the short term now adaptive for a lot

(40:18):
of us, you know. I mean, you have like something
kisses you off. The next day, it can be difficult
to focus on the things you need to focus on,
or to be present when you need to be present,
because you're just running the same dialogue through your head. Well,
you know, I actually have a kind of counterintuitive view
about the virtues of venting. People often talk about how

(40:39):
they had a bad day at work and they need
to vent, you know, and that's like I need to
just let off all the steam and talk about it.
I noticed that in myself and in other people, venting
very frequently does not alleviate frustrations but makes them worse
because you just get to talking about it, and then
you keep talking about it, and it makes you more
obsessed with the issue then you would have been otherwise.

(41:02):
What it makes me think of the scene in Poltergeist too,
where um, the dad coughs up the awful Giger creature
and then it crawls off, Like that's what I feel like.
Sometimes venting feels like it's like, oh, it's out of me,
but now it's out of me, and it's disgusting and horrifying.
Way to go. It's under the bed. Well, I think
if you're going to vent, I think you should try
to keep it short. You know, you should say what
you got to say, but don't dwell on it. If

(41:24):
you're dwell on it, it's it's just worse for you.
So pinch off that Giger and you know venting, Yeah,
that's all right, let her go. But then okay, so
back back to Summer. So Summer's chronicling the history of
this idea before before we get to maladaptive daydreaming, itself,
and in and eighty three he points out how Wilson

(41:44):
and Barber discovered there's this group of people that they
class as what are called fantasy prone personalities who were
avid day dreamers, and these people tended to quote live
much of their time in a world of their own making,
in a world of imagery, imagination, and fantasy. So these
people sort of have the ability to like pick a
theme and not just think about it a little bit,

(42:06):
but watch a scenario unfold in their imagination almost with
the same kind of continuous quality as a person would
watch a movie. They estimated that this group of fantasy
prone people with sort of high fantasizing capabilities is about
four percent of the general population, or up to four percent.
Other studies on fantasy proneness found somewhat similar numbers, maybe

(42:28):
between four percent and six percent of people, but also
found some interesting correlations. Fantasy prone adults had often been
encouraged to fantasize by a significant adult in their lives
when they were younger, and also uh fantasy proneness is
correlated with aversive childhood environments, with some studies finding that
though it's about four to six percent maybe in the

(42:49):
general population, it was at a rate of maybe nine
to fourteen percent in people with the history of childhood abuse.
And this sort of goes along, you know, in a
in a limit, it did way with the Freudian idea,
right that if you had some kind of inversive environment
when you were a child, you had some kind of
thing that you wanted to get through, you didn't want

(43:11):
to be present in the unpleasant reality you were living,
you would learn to come up with fantasy environments to cope.
And they also found that fantasizers were more prone to
depression and other issues. And we should we should be
clear that fantasy proneness is not necessarily the same thing
as maladaptive daydreaming, because there could be people who are
prone to fantasies, but it doesn't necessarily interfere with their lives.

(43:33):
And of course, when we're talking about ed adversary and trauma,
I mean it's it's not necessarily just like a situation
of like physical abuse, right, but just say, um, yeah,
you know problems at school or we have we always
have to remember how how difficult say a move can be. Uh,
family picks up and moves from one suited the other,
you know, changing schools, etcetera. Yeah, exactly, or social problems,

(43:57):
social isolation, um, any kind of family problems. I mean,
I think things like that can drive a child inward
and and send them to their inner resources. I mean,
I know, as you've probably described, I mean you've had
experiences like this, right, oh yeah, yeah, like you know,
moving from one school to another, of being an example,
or being in a school where you basically all of

(44:18):
middle school. I think this can Middle school was definitely
a time that drove me inward in a way that
I probably never quite returned from. Middle schoolers really are
the worst that is, like the worst age of humanity. Now,
another strain of research that emerged in the twentieth century
was that while healthy people use daydreaming to kind of

(44:39):
work through problems or to enhance good feelings, distressed people
can often enter into a kind of negative feedback loop
with daydreams in a lot of the same ways that
you could see other addictions coming into playing people's lives,
where the excessive day dreaming causes them to feel weak
or inadequate or generally bad about their lives for various reasons.

(45:01):
They might be you know, missing out on things that
it's causing them problems, and then the problems in their
lives are driving them to want a day dream more
so they can escape from their lives. It reminds me
the line and the Warren Zevon song Splendid Isolation. We're saying, Mickey,
take my hand and lead me through the world of self.
WHOA what albums that on? Was that the eighties? Oh?

(45:22):
I'm not sure when I got into the Zevon I
was the greatest hits album? Uh oh, I see it.
So I'm not exactly sure where one finds that in
its original form. You're one of those Yvon posers. You're
one of those those are sadly sadly uh so. So
clearly there are different kinds of daydreaming right there, people

(45:42):
with different levels of proneness. For some people it helps,
for some people it hurts. And so Summer was trying
to get a flavor of what this was like when
people claim to experience maladaptive daydreaming symptoms, and so he
used a qualitative methodology to assess people who presented with
what seemed to be negative patterns of daydreaming, which again
he coined this term maladaptive daydreaming. And so here here's

(46:04):
what he found common themes of daydreaming tended to be violence,
idealized self power and control, captivity, rescue and escape, and
sexual arousal. And I think that's kind of interesting because
it's strange how much it sounds like a list of
the most common themes and adventure stories. Yeah. I mean,
basically the that list could be the narrative flow of

(46:27):
a swashbuckling tale, uh huh. And then common functions he
identified apparently were disengagement from stress and pain by mood
enhancement and wish fulfillment fantasies. And then the other main
one was for companionship, intimacy and soothing. So he they
are all kinds of examples that he cites in his
paper from the interviews, I just picked a couple of

(46:48):
the more vivid ones to mention. Not all of them
are this action movie like, but I want to read
one of the quotes. Quote. I used to imagine America
and the West at war against the Communist lock. There
were bombardments, shelling, marine landings, and hand to hand battles
in which the Communists would have many casualties. I imagine
that my hometown is in ruins and under occupation, and

(47:11):
I am fighting a guerrilla war with the underground. Sometimes
I imagine myself fighting the guerrillas as part of the
occupying forces. I often imagine myself as a soldier in
battle against terrorists. I kill scores of them. The shooting
fantasies relieve my tension. It sounds like red Dawn, yeah, basically,
and it also reminds me of these the zombie apocalypse

(47:31):
fantasies we discussed earlier right, which can clearly serve as
a form of mental empowerment and escape. Right and then also,
like both of these examples, a simpler worldview and which
clearly defined lines of good and bad, of of of enemy,
and ally. Here's another one quote. I am seated on
the field of a football stadium, surrounded with barbed wire.

(47:53):
I am chosen by the prisoners to negotiate with the
captors because she is known to be an emotionally disassociate
ated person, hence not susceptible to psychological pressure. I am
allowed to walk toward a desk with two chairs and
sitting in the bigger one. My opponent is putting forth
his demands and threatens me with a gun. I pour
myself a hot drink and sit from it with stable hands,

(48:16):
smile at him and tell him that I am suicidal,
so he cannot threaten me with anything because I've got
nothing to lose. He realizes he lost the bargaining, and
I give the sign for the insurrection to begin. From
now on, it's like a Hollywood action movie with explosion,
smoke and lots of blood. Although I am wounded, I
managed to free most of the prisoners and I leave

(48:37):
them to safety. I love this because I get a
real Garth Marenghee dark place five from it. Blood, blood
and bits of the sick. It's such a great, great show. Now.
One of the really interesting things that I've found when
reading about maladaptive daydreaming, and that's reported in this study,
but then also in some others, is that there are

(48:58):
some common pros sesses associated with this, with obsessive or
maladaptive daydreaming UH processes having to do with physical place
and physical action, often with an object in the hand. Robert,
you mentioned earlier when you were a child that you
would day dream with a rubber band in your hand,
manipulating it with your hands always. I had to have

(49:19):
a rubber band, and you it had to be green
or red. It couldn't be just the brown ones because
they weren't they weren't exciting enough. And also this this
is I guess maybe this sounds kind of strange, but
the the red and green rubber bands were explosions. And
I would also make explosion noises as explosions were needed

(49:40):
in these imagined scenarios, because apparently there were a lot
of explosions. Well, I mean, given our samples, sometimes explosions
if you got to happen. I want to read a
quote from one of the subjects in Summer's study quote.
When I daydream, I often hold an object in my hand,
say an a racer or a marble. I taw sit
in the air. This repetitive monotone movement helps ME concentrate

(50:04):
on the fantasy. Daydreaming is easier when I do this
because I don't get distracted by other things in the room.
At other times, I would go down to the basement
and pace for hours while daydreaming. Also from the same patient,
sometimes I would go into an orchard behind my house.
Nobody comes there. I like the solitude because I could
act the fantasies out loud. I can shout and scream

(50:26):
there without shame. And these are commonly reported elements having
a place to go to, being in physical motion while
doing the daydreaming, like pacing or driving or something like that,
and having an object to manipulate in the hand. Why
that that is so interesting to me? Why those things? Yeah,
it really makes me think back on my my own

(50:48):
imaginative behavior as a kid, for sure. All right, well,
let's take a break and when we come back we
will continue and conclude our exploration of maladaptive daydreaming. Thank
thank thank you. All Right, we're back now. We mentioned earlier,
there's a good piece in The Atlantic about maladaptive daydreaming
from by Jane Biggleson and Tina Kelly called win day

(51:09):
Dreaming Replaces Real Life that has some really good stories
in it about what this experience is like. So I
just wanted to read maybe a couple of quotes from
this article of the author describing her own experience. She writes,
when I was eight years old, I had a game
I like to play in my front yard in suburban
New Jersey. My siblings were older and mostly out of

(51:29):
the house. My parents worked long hours, and when there
was nothing much to do, I'd walk in circles while
shaking a piece of string, daydreaming about Little House on
the Prairie or the Brady Bunch. One afternoon, I created
an episode where instead of going to Hawaii, where dangerous
spiders lurk, the Bradys went to the Bahamas, where I
had just been a week with my family. Greg Brady

(51:52):
met my teenage sister there and they started dating. The
show playing in my head was so detailed and entertaining
that it lasted forty five minute. Another day, I imagine
myself as the actress who played the seventh Brady sibling.
I met all the other young actors on set, and
they commented on my cute outfit and amazing acting skills. Again,
the string in her hand, the object to manipulate. Yeah,

(52:15):
I totally get it. I it's hard again, it's it's
it's difficult for me to put it into words, but
I know exactly what she's doing there. And the author
goes on to chronicle how with her experiences of of
of obsessive daydreaming going on throughout her life, she eventually
came to investigate this issue full like she got involved
in the subject of maladaptive daydreaming at the research level,

(52:38):
and she was a test subject in some research and
one of the things she found was that, So she
went in for some brain imaging for some fm R
I to look at what's going on in her brain
while she's actively daydreaming, and one of the things they
found was quote, great activity in the ventral stree atom,
the part of the brain that lights up when an
alcoholic has shown images of a martini. It's so it's

(53:00):
literally setting off some kind of addiction response type feeling
cheaper and healthier. Though right, probably healthier, but not necessarily
better for your life. I mean, depending on what the
circumstances are. I mean again, we we certainly don't want
to demonize healthy forms of daydreaming, but for many of
these people, they end up seeking communities online for people
who have the same issues as them, or seeking clinical

(53:22):
help because these people realize, like, this is taking up
so much of my life, it is making me unable
to live my life, it's interfering with my work, with
my relationships, it's it's gone beyond its useful role. One
of the other things that's interesting that gets pointed out
in this article is the possible overlap between maladaptive daydreaming

(53:44):
and a disorder that's been known as stereotypic movement disorder,
which involves repetitive motions of the body, kind of like
what we've been talking about with like pacing or repeatedly
UM moving you know, an object in the hand like
often SMD seems to have something to do with flapping
of the hands or movement of the arms or something

(54:04):
like that. And one of the things the authors talk
about is that UM. There was a study that studied
children who have stereotypic movement disorder forty two children, and
this was in two thousand and ten. And when the
researchers in the study asked the kids what they were
doing when they were performing their repetitive motions, eight three

(54:26):
percent of the of the kids said they were repeating
stories in their heads. So it sounds like there may
be some overlap with this existing known condition. And again
I wonder what is the neural link between the motions
of the body and the internal storytelling impulse. Well, it
makes me think back to the more recent study we

(54:47):
talked about discussing default mode network and the being on autopilot,
Like maybe there has to be some sort of autopilot
thing you're doing, and it could be swimming or or
pacing about, but also just manipulating an object. Maybe you're
not actually performing a task but in in object manipulation

(55:09):
or you know, some sort of basic tool use uh
and it maybe it's a necessary part of that network. Yeah,
that that could be. You know, one of the researchers
in this article who gets quoted talks about how there's
a possibility that day dreaming is somehow kind of like
a fever, Like it is a natural defense mechanism. It's
a cognitive defense mechanism for dealing with cognitive threats. Um.

(55:32):
But it can, of course, like a fever, be harmful
if it gets out of control. And for some people
this defense mechanism, while in some cases useful, it does
get out of control for them. What that makes sense too?
And when you think about the ways that that writer's
end up exploring, or not just writer has been any
kind of a you know creative individual is doing some
sort of art or something. To consider their art, you know,

(55:54):
you end up processing a lot of your own anxieties
and fears and hopes and dreams the who that art?
So it maybe and maybe that is just and something
that's overlaid here and not part of the actual uh
you know, origin of the the impulse. But maybe there's
a connection. Yeah, well, I mean I often think with
with like works of fiction. It's funny when people ask

(56:17):
authors like to interpret their own work in the light
of their biography. You know, you hear that. It's like, oh,
you wrote this character in this novel, who does this?
What is that? You know? How does that relate to
your life? This thing that happened to you? I feel
like you've got it backwards. You should be telling the
writer how what they wrote explains their life. The writer
doesn't know. Yeah, yeah, like like often the writer has

(56:40):
to sort of have the realization like, oh, well, I
guess I guess this story was about, you know, my
substance abuse problem or what have you. You You know. And
speaking of substance abuse, of course, I mean one of
the things that comes up again and again in these
reports is that some of the people who experience maladaptive
daydreaming compare it in way in some ways to an addiction.

(57:02):
Going back to you know what some of the brain
imaging seem to show we mentioned a minute ago, is
that there isn't an addiction like response in the brain,
and then some people subjectively describe it as being like
in addiction. One of the people quoted in the Atlantic
article says, I felt the daydreaming was my main reality
and I only peek out into the main world now
and then it's like I'm an alcoholic with an unlimited

(57:24):
supply of booze. I can't turn it off. Yeah, I mean,
for the most part, you don't have to worry about
becoming physically ill from too much daydreaming, or falling over
from too much daydreaming, etcetera. Like there, it seems like
there are fewer obviously their limits, but there are few
are hard limits involved there. Yeah, that's true. But as
we've seen, of course, it can be a strong interference

(57:46):
with the kind of life people want to live. And
that's the reason there are all these you know, support
groups and and a push to get this more recognized
in in psychiatric and psychological treatment communities now, and there
are some treatments that that seemed to be coming along.
I mean, we're still in the early days of understanding
maladaptive daydreaming as a psychological condition that that is treated

(58:10):
in a clinical way, but some are in his two
thousand two articles found that therapy helped some patients with
aspects of their maladaptive daydreaming, including reducing violent themes in
the daydreaming and reducing the amount of time spent on it.
There are some drugs that in some cases have been
found work. Fluvoxamine, which is primarily used to treat obsessive

(58:31):
compulsive disorder, has apparently been used with some success. Other
patients have had some success with S S R. Eyes.
One of the most interesting things I came across was
also from that Atlantic article that it referred to one
person with maladaptive daydreaming who said quote, I recently found
that constantly writing wandering thoughts down or keeping track of them,

(58:55):
keeps you from falling into intense daydreaming. So the act
of right, I mean this brings it back to the
Freud issue with like creative writing versus day dreaming. The
act of writing down your creative thoughts somehow makes them
stop flowing so hard, And I mean I know that
from experience. Sometimes it's almost like weaponizing writer's block against

(59:18):
your own imagination. You run the risk though then of
you know, you write down the ones that you think
I promise and then that to fill you with with
joy on some level. But then you don't maybe you
don't write down the ones that are like stupid and
uh and and awful, you know, the ones that are
that are that fall into that special category of you know,

(59:38):
because yeah, I feel like, especially people who are write
up like horror or anything horror esque, you know, they're
they're liable to turn their fears into something useful, into
something artistic and artistic expression of their fears. But what
do you do when it's just something dumb, Like it's
dumb and it's hurtful, uh, dumb and hurtful day dream
that you've got to make us like a special activity,

(01:00:00):
I guess, of extracting it, of putting it on paper
and then just watting it up and forgetting about it. Well,
you know, I wonder, so there's the common experience of
people sort of daydreaming by writing their lives into the
existing plots and storylines of other TV shows and books
and stuff like that. I wonder how often this type

(01:00:20):
of daydreaming phases into just writing fan fiction. Oh yeah,
because you're you're I can see that where that could
that could occur because you're just so into this world,
you know, and then you you can't help it, want
to become a part of it. Yeah, I can't help.
But wonder in general if if some people who have
this condition would find relief through just creative writing, like

(01:00:44):
if you force yourself to write kind of like this
this last person was saying, if you force yourself to
write your creative thoughts down, that might only not just
limit them, but also give you something productive you can
do with that time you spent. So you don't just say, well,
I spent three hours daydreaming today, I don't know you
know where that time went. You could say I spent
three hours writing today. Well, not only do I think

(01:01:07):
that's a great idea, but I totally support anything that
will create employment opportunities for my fellow creative writing majors. Well,
I think we have to accept that not all writing
can be writing for money, and that's okay. But you know,
if somebody is trying to tell you to write, they
should be paying you money. So let's bring it all
back to good old Kirk Allen. Okay. I mean, ultimately,

(01:01:29):
we just don't have a lot of hard facts about
about who he was or what he actually went through.
But I wonder how we can apply everything we've discussed
in these two episodes to his case. Yeah, I mean
I wonder if he would have directly fit this emerging
diagnosis of the maladaptive daydreamer. Um, and I don't know.
I wonder what we what we will continue to learn

(01:01:50):
about maladaptive daydreaming in the in the coming years, and
whether that will shed any new light on the Kirk
Allen story. Yeah. And of course we have a lot
of listeners out there who to write in and share
their experiences with us. And I know that all of
you have experiences with daydreaming, and I imagine there are
going to be some of you who have experience with
maladaptive daydreaming or something that in self analysis feels close

(01:02:15):
to what we've described here. So we would love to
hear from you. And of course we can keep things
anonymous if if you would hope, if you want to
do it that way, sure, um, you know so, certainly
just stress that point when you when you reach out
to us. But yeah, we want to hear from everyone
about your day dreams. If you have had maladaptive daydreaming,
what have you found, if anything that has helped you

(01:02:36):
reduce that down to a tolerable level or helped you
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