JAYNE BIGELSEN has always been a dreamer. In her early childhood, television captured her imagination. “I was watching certain shows over and over…and I was creating my own episodes,” she says. Did. But by her teenage years, Bigelsen’s fantasy world had become more all-consuming. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to continue my story,” she says. “I remember being frustrated when I ran into a friend because I had to stop talking about myself and talk.”
Everyone knows the fun of daydreaming. Whether it’s envisioning your next vacation or your ideal romantic partner, it’s fun to let your desires drift into your vivid stream of consciousness. Even better, research shows that daydreaming isn’t a waste of time, it has all sorts of benefits, and it’s especially important for brain development. We spend a lot of time doing that, so it does as well. Two-thirds of his children have imaginary friends. One in ten he invents a fantasy world – a “paracosm”. When psychologists tracked the mental states of 15,000 volunteers, he found that adults spend about half of their waking hours daydreaming.
Nevertheless, you can have too many good things. Psychologists call this maladaptive fantasy. They believe it can be addictive and its prevalence has increased during the covid-19 pandemic. Much of this condition remains a mystery, but we are beginning to see who is prone to it, what causes it, and how it can occur…
