My Story

[Erica Tamizi]

Hi everyone!

This is my first ever post so I thought maybe it should be about my story and why I decided to join this network.

My name is Erica, 20 years old. This is the first time ever I'm sharing this part of my life so my post might be a little awkward.

I don't know when I started to become a daydreamer but I guess I just had it in me for a long time. I don't usually dream when I'm sleeping but I always had this belief that if I dream about taking the exam in my sleep then I will get a good grade. This is a little weird but honestly every time I dreamt about taking the test in my sleep I got a pretty good grade. I recently realized that I normally have this dream in the morning when I'm half sleep so it might be a daydreaming. However, this is not even the start to my story. 

I was going through some rough time when I was around 13-14 years old and I moved to another country when I was 15. That might have been when everything started. I wasn't getting along with anyone at my school and break times started to become my most hated times since I had to watch others all happy and I was alone. So I started skipping classes and that became a habit. Then I started skipping the whole school day to just sit at my room watching movies and thinking. I would think about a lot of things: possible sequels or prequels to my favourite movies, how better I could answer the questions that people asked me before, what others thought of me when I said something. I failed some tests, some classes. Then I started putting myself as the female lead character to movies and series that I liked and make whole new stories with conversations in my head. I would pause the movie to just get my thoughts on the right track. I just thought that I'm doing this because I'm a creative person with a lot of potential to be writer. Though literature has never been my favourite subject. 

Then this became part of me. I started believing that I'm an introvert person doing all fine when I'm alone. Sometimes I just can't stop thinking about this imaginary life that I made in my head for myself. Sometimes I would beg myself to stop thinking and go to sleep. 

The other day I was trying to apply for a volunteering position and it needed 4 references: one family, one employer and 2 non-family. Then I realized that I don't live in real life. My alternative life in my head lives a perfect life and I feel too awkward to ask anybody. Almost invisible. Then I thought who is the real me? who am I? I googled "I have an imaginary life in my head" to just see if I'm the only one doing this or not and came across an article on Scientific American by Josie Glausiusz that had this website mentioned. So here I am trying to daydream in a healthy way.

Here is the article if anyone wants to read it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-in-an-imaginary-w...