A Theory

[Tuxedo Knux]

Why do we daydream? Why do we make up characters and interact with them in the scenarios we choose? This question has been puzzling me for sometime and I think I now finally have an answer. As humans we thrive on human interaction, somewhere out there they're is someone at a party having the best of times. He/she is surrounded by the people they love interacting with and all is good in their minds. I think we daydream because we are lonely in a various amount of ways. Some of us truly have no one to talk too, others are surrounded by people that they don't trust, and lastly there are those who are too broken to even try to interact with their fellow man. I believe we naturally daydream to create a substitute for this need for human interaction. Our brains may have recognized something was amiss and developed the creative pathways to create such characters and worlds in our own minds. 

Any thoughts?

[The1andonlyAbber]

Possibly. I'm an introvert, so interacting with people is very draining for me and I have to "recharge" afterwards. Then again, my daydreams involve interacting with people a lot (my daydream self is most certainly an extrovert), yet daydreams are one of the things that help me recharge. Maybe it's because I subconsciously know that I'm really interacting with myself and exploring my own mind. However, I've have MD for years, and it may have originally started out of a need for social interaction. Mine started when I was 7 years old, about a year after I moved to a new town. Even though it had been over a year since we moved to the town, I still didn't have any friends because everyone there thought I was weird. I was an only child, and my first daydream that was seriously MD-ish was about having an imaginary brother.

[Floris]

Quoting Elena " I can have a full fledge debate all by myself and learn so much from it"

So true. I do this a lot.

[Floris]

Loneliness can be a cause but interacting with humans can also be lonely and tedious. Boredom is also an important catalyst for daydreaming and it can be related to the loneliness. Daydreaming is considered more normal for kids, I pity those that lose the ability when they grow up. Daydreaming can help conjuring up new ideas or make your feel better sometimes.

It's true that sometimes it's a survival mechanism like in Cast Away but it can also breathe life into anything creative. As tough as it can be I prefer to see it as a strength rather than a weakness. There's enough boredom in the world already and no need for more bad copies of copies of people. If I had more friends I'd probably share more ideas with them but a lot of daydreams are just guilty pleasures...it's not necessarily terrible when you are more able to enjoy time alone, dogma says were are all equally social animals but the truth is people are many different animals and some are not so social...spiders are not social, cats can be solitary too.

[Elena]

In my case I daydreamed a lot as a kid.  The combination of being an only child, living on a busy street, and a latch key kid left me alone for many hours.  Also we were not a TV house.  So I just played dress up and with 'imaginary friends.'  I think when I had difficulty connecting with other kids at school I started to use it as a crutch and that's when it being maladaptive.  

I find that I have an ability to dive into a topic mentally which has helped me a lot at work.  It's when I can't direct it that I run into trouble.  Or when I'm just bored and using it to avoid doing something else, like housework (ugh).   The ability to fully imagine is a really neat way to explore a topic.  Sometimes my MD is just fantasy, but I also use it a lot to analyse my day, articles I've read and to explore political beliefs.  I can have a full fledge debate all by myself and learn so much from it.  I'd like to think that this is a blessing if we can keep it form getting away from us.

[Ivy White]

Hm, missing that connection. I don't know. I've been accused of being "emotionally unavailable". But the truth is, I am very guarded. I've got huge barriers around what I consider as my real self. I have tried to open up with my current boyfriend but it seems like he doesn't go that deep, as if he didn't understand. A friend of mine does though. My first boyfriend did too. My parents never did, nobody in my family. I've never felt completely accepted or good enough by anyone. Which is always the case for my DD characters and their relationships.

[Jui]

I believe the searching for meaningful human contact is a big point for me. I always try to live up to high standarts and only want to achieve the highest possible. It makes me sad not to be able to live up to that and it makes me feel better to know in my DD I am able to do all that.
With that there is the question for me: Why are we missing this things in the first place?

[Ivy White]

Maybe not so much loneliness as meaningful human contact. I have  boyfriend, I meet up with friends almost every night, but I still miss the feeling of people touching me to my core. That's kind of what I'm after with the characters I interact with in daydreams. I feel like I am looking at life through a mudded glass and it feels always a bit bland and lukewarm. Daydreams don't. The people in them don't feel as "meh" either.

[Tuxedo Knux]

That cool!

[Richard Quest]

I kind of disagree with this for myself. For others this very well might be the case. I started to daydream because I had nothing to do. I had a lot of friends in elementary school when I started and I still do over ten years later. I think I do it because of the universe I created, it is so intriguing to me; I just can't stop.