My story....

[Alyssa]

Since I just signed up here, I figured I could use something of an introduction blog post to just talk about who I am and how I ended up here. I'm just going to be typing things out as they come to mind but trying to stay in order, so this may get a little long. I'm also not going to hold back some personal information since I am attempting to explain myself, so keep that in mind before you start. If you do take the time to read it all, I hope you find it interesting or at least entertaining!

My name is Alyssa and I'm, at the time of this writing, a 22 year old transwoman. I've been a daydreamer for as long as I can remember. I can remember back to when I was a very young child and one day I was just sitting around the house and suddenly pictured something in my imagination, something that I had come up with on my own, for the first time. I excitedly ran to my dad to tell him what I had done, and the rest is history.

I wasn't one of those transgender kids who figured out what was going on with them before they even started going to school; I was never really exposed environments or situations that would bring that out of me at that age unlike kids who had sisters or the like, so I figure it just never occurred to me to question it back then. I did know that something felt off though, and one of my biggest concerns at the time is why I never really fit in anywhere and why I never felt comfortable doing the things that guys did. But without knowing what it was I focused on other issues that I felt might be the problem, like my weight. I've never been what I would call obese but I am definitely above average, and I was picked on for it as a kid. My own perception of myself became more and more blown out of proportion as I aged and for the longest time I even wanted to become anorexic or bulimic to deal with it, but by the time I felt that way I knew I was transgender, and I never bothered with it because I knew it would be a pointless endeavor if I wasn't going to make myself actually look good (as a girl) anyway....

Even at that age I had an overactive imagination and always thought of intricate, though not always entirely original, scenarios for my friends and I to act out in our free time. I really loved just imagining things, and it was not uncommon for me to slip into a fully anesthetic-like state just from being zoned out for too long. A couple of particularly powerful experiences stand out in memory where I was in a complete dream-like state totally separate from reality, while my actual body continued to function on autopilot. I also started masturbating at age 8 and used orgasms as a vehicle for reaching those states of mind; it was a little while before I became aware of their normal sexual function. The fantasies I would use were just as complex and bizarre as the games I would come up with, and rarely involved anything sexual at all until I got older. It mostly centered around abstract plots, sort of dream-like, involving lots of transformations and BDSM dynamics. The inner world began to grow and turned into this place where I could escape to at any time to forget about the troubles of real life and be all powerful for a while.

After I realized that I'm transgender, at the beginning of middle school, all of my daydreams started taking the themes they had been using and propelling them in a whole new direction. I started creating the perfect, idealized female self that I felt I had within me, and "she" was always who I was in my imagination. This is also the point that my fantasies started to become truly sexual, but still in a very... off way. Another issue that I had had from a younger age was facing the fact that I was occasionally having romantic daydreams about boys I knew, and I grew up in an area full of homophobic people and was terrified about being thought of as gay, though I personally have never had any problem with gay people. Of course, just liking guys would really just make me a straight girl anyway, but I didn't know that at the time. By the time I did realize that I'm female, that way of thinking had already sort of been self-bashed into my head and I ended up sort of tricking myself into thinking that I liked girls and not guys even long after I accepted who I am, so through all of my puberty I felt attracted to girls even though I didn't truly want to have sex with them, I just thought they were appealing. As a result, all of my "sexual" fantasies focused entirely on heavy expression of emotions, things like envy and power, and over-the-top scenes and imagery to take me all the way, without any actual sex being involved.

Following on from my personality from a young age, I was always obsessed with making up new fantasy stories and scenarios just to keep myself entertained all the time. As I moved into puberty these stories became more and more intense and magical, and likely from all the pain I was feeling at the time, some of them got very dark and violent. For a long time I felt like I was on the verge of psychosis, and I frequently killed time at school by drawing fields of eyes and fractals and deformed creatures to reflect how I was feeling inside. My storytelling began to merge with my secret life that I would live while I was alone, of living as my female self. I felt like the more I could bring that daydreaming side of me out, the more I would be able to be who I really am, so I continued using other methods of stimulation such as masturbation to bring it out as much as possible, and over time I built up very addictive behaviors. At the end of high school I began using drugs both to rid myself of some of my anxiety and to further bring myself into the fantasy world that I had created for myself. When I would use weed and hallucinogens I would actually start to become that person that I always imagined I could be, and LSD and psilocybin mushrooms specifically would just make my daydreams and my reality become one and the same.

I could ramble for ages about my tripping phase, but the most important detail of it is that I eventually started way overdoing the drugs, including some particularly terrible ones like diphenhydramine, in order to totally enter my perfect reality and forget my actual one, and it started giving me all sorts of withdrawals and lingering mental health problems. What mainly happened was that I started getting a lot of derealization and anxiety problems leading up to frequent panic attacks, as well as making my already existing depression become a lot worse. I also hallucinations sticking around from high dose abuse, which I had actually aimed for repeatedly in order to mold my future trips to be exactly how I wanted them to be every time. In order to cope with all of these problems, I started drinking alcohol somewhat heavily and went to a lot of parties, but dropped everything else besides weed. I was also prescribed Xanax for a short while. These sedatives helped at first but eventually only made things even worse. I eventually couldn't take any more and got up the courage to come out about being transgender to my parents and more of my friends, and to my great relief everyone was totally fine with it. Just a few months after that, I was able to start taking my hormones and felt great about it.

Not long after that started, I quit smoking weed and got really into lucid dreaming. The drinking lasted for a little while after that but I finally was able to drop it too, for the most part. I actually got to the point of having bad withdrawals for about seven days after every party, so it's a good thing I got out when I did. My whole life was feeling pretty sucky at that point and my imagination had turned on me to stop being an escape and just provide me with one impending doom panic attack after another for months, but it was the lucid dreaming that was finally able to really help pull me out of it. I got pretty good at it and even managed to get to the point where I would get lucids just out of the blue every now and then without even trying. In my dreams what I found was the same incredible feeling of freedom that drugs and orgasms gave me but all around me, and my dream world was just like my daydreams and totally within my control. I developed one superpower after another and worked on perfecting things like possession, mind control, shapeshifting, general reality bending, and anything else that would allow me to live out any scenario I ever wanted and become the person I always wanted to be.

Through lucid dreaming I was able to regain some of my interest in life, and it was also the jumping off point for how I got into my first relationship. It was mostly online, but we were really into it. I suddenly understood why people go crazy over love, because I was nuts! My daydreams were becoming much healthier again and started taking on an almost spiritual or religious overtone as I pictured my ex and I being together forever. It certainly helped that it had been less than a year since I first allowed myself to accept that I'm attracted to guys, and my mind was playing catch up. My fantasies at the time were out of control and so overly sexual, and being in a relationship was just bringing that female side of me that I had grown to associate with my daydreams out all the time and I was loving it. I also began smoking weed again some time after getting into that relationship, though with an aim to use it as a more psychedelic drug that I could use for mind expansion and personality development rather than just to get high. I still did use it for that reason a lot, but I started to have powerful experiences that helped me to overcome my still lingering anxiety and overcome a lot of my fears, both drug-induced and just from life in general, and combined with my hormones therapy and life at the time I started to actually enjoy who I am. That's when things got really intense.

With my daydreams, I've always had the issue with speaking to myself or making facial expressions, gestures, laughter, and so on that responds to something that happens in the fantasy. But one neat aspect of it that I've also always had is a strong ability to "feel" things, in a manner of speaking. I remember using it once as a child to imagine eating a cold ice cream pop on a warm summer day outside and it actually did help somewhat. The same has also proven true of strong emotions; one that I can do easily is imagine someone taking ecstasy for the first time and feelings waves of euphoria like I remember from my first time coursing through me, though much weaker of course, but still the same feeling. I even once had a problem with taking a large dose of a speedy psychedelic, where the thought of how stimulated I was going to be actually caused me to begin shaking heavily like I was already on the drug before I had even dosed. Well, now that I was actually thinking about regular sex (relatively speaking) with the gender I'm really interested in, a peculiar thing was happening. My daydreams that I pictured vividly enough were causing me to have feelings comparable to orgasm just from "feeling" that sex, which was just incredible to me because without having had my surgery I can't yet actually experience that feeling in reality.

I basically become hooked, this was my new addiction. A combination of my ex and all the weed helped me push it to places that I never even thought possible, places that felt way more psychedelic than any trip I ever had. Just from fantasizing I would feel myself entering a perceived state of cosmic union with the universe, like my spirit was really coming alive. I began to research sexual practices like tantra and started drawing comparisons between my experiences and those with things such as kundalini awakenings, which involve rushes up the spine and potentially things like ego death. The rushes I definitely get whenever I enter those states, but I don't think I've ever had one complete all the way before, nor do I think I've experienced a "full" awakening or something of that sort yet. However, I think about it quite often.... From that point on I really became obsessed with everything to do with sex, aside from actually having it. My daydreams began focusing more and more on it so that I could push that euphoric release to its very maximum potential, which continued getting stronger for some time until I started to become burnt out from the weed again, which I'm still in the process of trying to quit again to let my brain's pleasure centers balance out some. Ultimately though, I was just starting to get lost in it.

My ex and I eventually broke up because I decided that I wasn't ready for a serious relationship yet and still just wanted to explore with things, and I started investigating the fetish lifestyle community around where I live. I began talking to lots of people into BDSM and was finding that for once I really could talk about all this crazy, hypersexual fantasy stuff I had on my mind at all times and not feel weird or different. It was a wonderful feeling, and I ended up trying out various toys and learning more about different fetishes just to get myself really involved in the scene. I'm also starting to explore the idea of polyamory and I've been opening up to people more to try to explore intimate friendships and become okay with my body and what kind of person I am. I think I would have to say that all of this has had the most helpful impact on my daydreaming of anything in my life, because similarly to the hallucinogens only actually real this time, it helped bringing my fantasies to life. It's been an incredibly important step in moving my life from being at a point where my daydreams really are like an addiction that I can't escape to being something that I just do in my free time to have fun while I'm resting from enjoying my legitimately awesome life. My old excuses that my imagination is more exciting than reality begin to crumble when my reality actually starts mimicking my imagination.

Of course, I still daydream way too much, but I feel like I'm finally starting to have control over it now. I still sometimes worry about whether or not I'm doing the right things with my life like anyone does, but at least I'm taking action now and making the most of things. I'm on my way to really loving myself and taking bigger and bigger strides every day, and the more progress I make the more I know I can bring my fantasies into reality. That may not be the outcome that everyone is looking for here as far as overcoming issues with daydreaming goes, and depending on what kind of personality you have I suppose it may seem odd to shoot for the life full of ridiculous sex and drug experiences and the like, but I am who I am and I'm finally okay with that.... I'm an extremist, and being tied up, hypnotized, tripping on acid, and in the midst of such a powerful orgasm that I'm participating in a divine communication with reality just sounds like a great way to relax to me.

I suppose you could say that the main point of this story, aside from just showing who I am, is to sort of relate to how I came to have some control over my daydreams, and suggest that it's not always bad to do it as long as you just manage to keep your life on track and enjoy yourself in your free time. I'm still just learning about this community but I've seen people who seem to be trying to avoid daydreams all together like a drug or some other terrible habit that people try to break, and I personally don't think that this is the only option. I've had OCD tendencies since I was a child and what I eventually learned about those is that it's the ticks that you worry about the most that are the hardest to let go of; the ones that you just accept and let them become background knowledge are the ones that eventually fade away. Moderation really is the key in overcoming addictions, if you ask me, in any form.

So just food for thought, I guess. I've probably passed over some things here and there since I've been typing so much, so I'll just end the story here for now. If you've actually taken the time to read through this whole thing, you have my deepest gratitude and I hope you enjoyed it and maybe got something out of it, if you needed it!

[Alyssa]

@Aquarius: Thanks so much! :) I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. I certainly will contribute where I can, I'm still buzzing just from finding this place. I've met plenty of other people who do this kind of daydreaming before but I never knew there was a whole community for it. I'm sure I'll be looking around here a lot!

 

@MatthewR: Thank you, I really appreciate the kind words! You're right on the nose, too. "You seem to have solved the riddle of your daydreams by embracing and fusing both your sexuality and spirituality." This is exactly what I've been trying to work for, and everything you said about how what you think MDD is strikes a chord with me. Especially, of course, the idea of something inside not jiving with the outside world. One of the ways I actually picked up over time to help myself become okay with being transgender is to think of myself as lucky in the sense that the major source of anxiety in my life has a clear solution and steps outlined by countless others who have walked the path before me. Not everyone is so fortunate, and I do believe that that mindset helped me a lot in overcoming my issues. So I know exactly what you mean, and I'm hoping I can help others understand it as well.

But yeah, I certainly wouldn't recommend the drug route to people either haha. Even just in general the only one I suggest people try is weed, I'm a big medical marijuana proponent lol. But if people are already willing to explore that life then I think it can help certain things if used correctly, but there certainly are risks too.... Knowing what I do now, I would much sooner suggest the safe, natural, and free options like lucid dreaming and meditation instead if one did want to explore their mind. I don't have a problem with psychedelics or anything, but I do think that they're only things that people should come to the decision to use themselves, after much research and treating them with respect... not something to just tell people to go try to fix their lives, as that could have some bad consequences.

Anyway, I'm so happy that you were able to take something away from my story. I hope it helps you in the long run. :) And don't beat yourself down! I think we all have that courage stored somewhere inside us, we just need to find the right push to bring it up to the surface. Through most of my struggles I felt like I was a very weak person, but my friends continued to tell me over and over that I was strong, and one day I finally started believing them and the whole world changed.... But there's nothing different about me, I just understand my potential now. You are a strong person on the inside too, so don't let anyone or anything make you believe otherwise!

[Aquarius]

what a fantastic post Alyssa! Incredibly brave too. There's a lot that you can contribute to this forum, do post your views on the discussions going on here, would be interesting to read them.