How I believe my daydreaming started, how it progressed, and how it is now.

[Rosethewolf]

When I was a child, the earliest memory of my daydreams was my dragon called Raptos. I believe I created him around five years old. He was small enough to lay on my child head but he always had a moody, snippy behavior but adored me. He would grunt and snort my bad behaviors or lightly pop me in the head with his tail or his hand.  In class he would fly around making funny faces at the teacher or prance on his head or set fire to our homework.

When I was little, I read so many novels and spent most of my time in the library reading fantasy and fiction. Then the bullying started and didn't end until 6+ years later. This changed my daydreaming and me. It just started out with a dragon. Then when the bullying started my daydreams progressed and grew. Before I knew what had happened I created a new reality around me. It made me feel so much better. I could do anything that I wanted. But it also made things worse as well. When I was really depressed during the harder times of the bullying my daydreaming echoed how I felt, made me visualize the hurtful words that were spoken, created scenarios that never happen but angered me even more.

One day I snapped during elementary gym class. I was around 7 years old and We were playing hockey and one of the fun guys named V (not going to say his actually name) came up to me and suddenly started talking trash about me. He said so many hurtful things right in my face. He wasn't the one bullying me but I didn't care at the time. I was always a quiet girl. Stayed away from a lot of the other children. Read instead of talking with the other kids. But I finally snapped that day. I punched him so hard I knocked him unconscious for a couple of seconds and he had a bloody nose. The gym teacher liked me a lot so she tore up the referral note and sent me to the restroom. I remember looking at myself in the mirror crying...but also laughing. I became twisted that day.

For the next couple of years I was the one sent to the principal's office so very much.   I became aggressive and feisty. Got in a lot of fights and did stupid things for no reason at all. I cried myself to sleep every night. I hated going to school. I always believed that my daydreams was where I truly belonged and they would take me away. 7 years later the bully finally left me alone.

Then my friends came to my rescue, pulled me out of the hole I was digging myself and gave me lots of love and happiness. It is because of them that I am still alive today.

But the emotional scars remain to this day. I have very low esteem for myself.  I have been forever changed by the bully. Forever feisty with a twisted mind but I have also changed myself as well. I am playful and hyper. I have a strong moral. I am more cheerful and happy. But I still keep to myself at times.Up until the last couple months of my high school graduation, I didn't care about the real world that much or for myself. I didn't care about my appearance or how I acted. All that mattered was when I got home. When I went into my room of solitude and stayed there, playing with Raptos (who is now bigger then a two story house) and the other characters in my world.

No one knew. My parents probably don't even know that I was a victim of bullying. No else knew about Raptos or my new world. Where dragons and creatures from movies and novels exist. The place where faeries live and where magic is real. This is the world I am currently living in. It is wonderful It is exciting. It is an addiction. Then when my mother took me to do an assessment of my ADHD progression, that's when I became curious and a bit depreesed. The results came in that I "may be hallucinating and/or may be experiencing in-dept dreams of a false- reality". Of course my parents were shocked and baffled. When the time came as they questioned me about it.

I lied to their face.

They nodded and sent me away to discuss more about it. I became depressed for a while but shrugged it off eventually and visited my "other world" for a long time. I became aware of Maladaptive daydreaming when I looked up my symptoms from my ADHD assessment report.

I wanted to tell someone! Anyone, about my daydreams...to at least get it off my chest.

A month ago I finally did. I told of couple of my classmates (10-20 years older then me) in college that befriended me and became attached to me quickly about it. They are awesome about it and they will help me in anyway.

My daydreams are triggered by music, anime, movies, novels, etc.

My dreams are so vivid, so real. I love them a lot and the characters I created, including my dragon who has never left my side. But I dream of things besides fantasy and fiction. I dream of having a romantic relationship with one of my best friends, dream of other things.

I found out that recently I need to socialize more with people. I need to hang out with people outside of class. This will lower my ability to daydream when I am bored or when I am alone.

I felt like sharing this.

If anyone has any questions or concerns let me know.

I also want to know, if you don't mind sharing, how and when did your MD start and how has it progressed?

[Becca]

i've thought alot about how mine progressed too. I know when i was little i had imaginary friends like lots of normal kids, i just took mine a bit more seriously than most. I dreamt i was the leader of a tribe of baboons...(dont know why i picked baboons haha) and my like second in command was my bff emily, who was also a monkey. She was SO real to me, and i treated her like she was real, and i felt the need to protect my tribe like they were real too, my older sister says i would always ditch her to go play with my baboon friends instead. I had my own language i would scribble in a notebook and pretend i wa writing to them. i was much more active in my imagination than most maybe but no one thought anything o it, and eventuallly they kind of cam e to a close for a year or few.

then i moved to another state, I had a hard time making friends at first and hated it for a little while. i would lay inbed and try clicking my heels like dorethy, or try thinking it was all a dream and i'd wake up and be back in ohio. i love art so i started this thing where every evening i would go up in my room, take out my disney coloring book and try to draw the princesses freehanded. i would let my mind wander as i drew and i soon began forming stories in my head that i was a princess and id always be in some danger where i had to escape or save the city or something. i began to get very into my daydreams and would just sit and daydream instead of even drawing, I got more and more into them, (this all started around 6th grade) I would imagine different scenarious and different outcomes and slowly by slowly they would become more and more intense and dramatic and sometimes violent. sometimes i was a princess, or an explorer, or a missionary. my daydreams were very vivid but still only when i wanted to, like relaxing or before bed, by the time i got into highschool tho they were getting out of control. sometime i switched the story to me being kidnapped which has made them increasingly violent and dark which scares me even more of telling people. im now about to graduate and i daydream aaalll the time, morning, night, school, church, with friends, by myself, I've tried to stop multiple times now, i even tried giving it up for lent but that failed by the 2nd day....I'm just glad now that i found this site & know some more of what it is and that im not the only one.

[The1andonlyAbber]

Raptos sounds a lot like my dragon, David. My first-ever MD paracosm--fancy word for "imaginary world" (I also had one when I was about 4 or 5 but it wasn't all MD-ish, just a normal childhood game)-- pretty much revolved around my adventures with David (and later his family and even an entire dragon breeding farm I owned), along with some imaginary siblings and an imaginary school I created for myself. I was homeschooled and an only child and lived in a weird place where there were no other houses. I think my MD started when I was 7. I created the school and siblings at age 8, but my adventures with David started at age 7. I've always had a crazy imagination, though, and I'm very creative. I do remember pacing at age 7. I wanted to imagine that I was in a motorcycle race, but for some reason I almost instinctively felt that I needed to pace up and down to focus on the daydream. The daydream was really exciting and I started sprinting without realizing it and crashed into the wall. That really scared me, so after that I stopped pacing and started acting things out with props (not necessarily toys, just anything I thought would make the daydream seem more real). After we moved when I was 9 my paracosm changed. I daydreamed that I was in charge of a large society of other kids who were all daydreamers like me (I used to think I was the only one in real life, but now I know differently). I had daydreams within my main daydream, which was pretty wild. That paracosm got boring, so I got rid of it. Now I daydream that I became the queen of a large intergalactic empire (it's a REALLY long story how that happened). In all of my daydreams I'm myself (except for my last paracosm--during the daydreams-within-daydreams I was usually another character). In my latest paracosm, I explain my other paracosms that I got rid of to explain my past in the daydream. The story now says that my first paracosm with the siblings and school and stuff was real, but when we moved the siblings couldn't come with because they were only foster kids and we were moving out of state, and I obviously couldn't bring the school or the farm with. The story also says I was part of a special scouting organization for children with mental issues, but I wasn't leader, it wasn't for MD specifically, and the reason I left was because it was only for kids 8th grade and under (and, conveniently, I ended that one as soon as I began high school).

[The1andonlyAbber]

I think it's kind of cool that I was able to find a way to make all of my different daydreams take place in the same universe.

[The1andonlyAbber]

Wow. That's the best story of my MD in a nutshell that I was able to come up with so far.

[The1andonlyAbber]

Oh, and now I rarely act things out. Sometimes I would act things out and sometimes I would just sit there and imagine it all, but now I mainly just sit there. Maybe I should act things out more. It would be great exercise.

[The1andonlyAbber]

While I had the dragon farm I had a few other minor daydreams, but they would usually not last for very long. The longest minor daydream besides my main dragon farm one was one where I was a pioneer. That lasted for about a month and a half.

[Rosethewolf]

wow it is nice tp hear how others had their MD and how it was.
 
Becca said:

i've thought alot about how mine progressed too. I know when i was little i had imaginary friends like lots of normal kids, i just took mine a bit more seriously than most. I dreamt i was the leader of a tribe of baboons...(dont know why i picked baboons haha) and my like second in command was my bff emily, who was also a monkey. She was SO real to me, and i treated her like she was real, and i felt the need to protect my tribe like they were real too, my older sister says i would always ditch her to go play with my baboon friends instead. I had my own language i would scribble in a notebook and pretend i wa writing to them. i was much more active in my imagination than most maybe but no one thought anything o it, and eventuallly they kind of cam e to a close for a year or few.

then i moved to another state, I had a hard time making friends at first and hated it for a little while. i would lay inbed and try clicking my heels like dorethy, or try thinking it was all a dream and i'd wake up and be back in ohio. i love art so i started this thing where every evening i would go up in my room, take out my disney coloring book and try to draw the princesses freehanded. i would let my mind wander as i drew and i soon began forming stories in my head that i was a princess and id always be in some danger where i had to escape or save the city or something. i began to get very into my daydreams and would just sit and daydream instead of even drawing, I got more and more into them, (this all started around 6th grade) I would imagine different scenarious and different outcomes and slowly by slowly they would become more and more intense and dramatic and sometimes violent. sometimes i was a princess, or an explorer, or a missionary. my daydreams were very vivid but still only when i wanted to, like relaxing or before bed, by the time i got into highschool tho they were getting out of control. sometime i switched the story to me being kidnapped which has made them increasingly violent and dark which scares me even more of telling people. im now about to graduate and i daydream aaalll the time, morning, night, school, church, with friends, by myself, I've tried to stop multiple times now, i even tried giving it up for lent but that failed by the 2nd day....I'm just glad now that i found this site & know some more of what it is and that im not the only one.

[Rosethewolf]

yeah it took me a while but mine eventually merged as well.

The1andonlyAbber said:

I think it's kind of cool that I was able to find a way to make all of my different daydreams take place in the same universe.