When MD gets intense...

[Brian Lee Carlson]

Does anyone else have this where every once in a while, like perhaps once in a few months, my attachment to my characters, the settings, and stories, and their lives become intense. It's this... sickly feeling, like I'm on the verge of tearing up and I just HAVE to indulge in it hardcore. Find all the media related to my characters, listen to all the right songs etc.. It's like looking at a super beautiful painting with raw emotion, or a beautiful song. I'm writing this because I'm going through it right now. I know it'll pass, perhaps in a couple of days, and I'll go back to feeling *mostly* normal. It's weird. I can sometimes feel the click happen. But right now it just sucks. It's out of my control, and nothing in particular seems to trigger; it seems random. I feel I'm going crazy...

[Emma]

I'm sorry man.  It sucks and is exciting all at once.

[Cemre]

I have it too. It's like... I just have to see what my characters are doing. Like a visit. I can't stop it. It just comes to my mind suddenly.

[Pathfinder]

I used to have it too. But I think it was always triggered by a story. It got out of control for who knows how many weeks...It was a spiral. Do you have that? I got lost, and as you said, it was sickly, it was like eating something very-very sweet like honey until you are real sick and then comes the overwhelming feeling that this is never gonna come true and it sucks that I see it all so clearly and it just won't happen. It always ended like this: me carrying a heart heavy as stone and feeling real depressed and upset and tricked. And the whole thing was so intense that it actually took me many years to figure out the pattern!! Afterwards I would try to remember how it all happened, all the emotions - but since it was so emotional and I was so deeply in and so lost - I just could not!

I agree with the one before me: try to figure out if there is a trigger and if it's on - you know it will end. I think you do the right thing. Go with it until it ends. Maybe later on in your life it will become a bit different. I did not get lost this way for a while now. I always am as an MD, but not that much then in my teenage years everything just disappeared for days.

[Tuxedo Knux]

Dude I feel you.

[Barney Hartnell]

I definitely get this! It's like randomly the themes and events I've been working on all come together and I get a real direction in my daydream, and once that happens its pretty impossible to stop. Annoyingly these 'intense' periods generally only happen when I have little else actively going on i.e. when I have a few days I can just stay in my house. This is a problem right now as I'm on study leave for my exams, so I'll end up doing tons of research in terms of music, images etc. and will then daydream for periods of 2 hours on and of for days whilst totally ignoring any and all revision I have to do (which is obviously really irritating). That being said I do tend to get more obvious triggers- generally the 'click' in themes and tone in my daydream comes from me getting really involved in any kind of media (this can be a TV show, an active sub reddit, most recently it was a well written fanfiction!), so you could potentially try and figure out if there is any trend leading up to these periods if not an obvious trigger- if there isn't at least you know they're only short term