When did it start for you?

[Dee]

Do you remember how MDaydreaming started for you? How old were you and why do you think you needed to do it?

I remember being about 4 years old. I always liked pretending but this is the first time i remember  really pretending  to be somebody else.

My mom was a stay at home mom. I had an older sister and an older bother who were in school. I was alone at home with mom. She got into the habit of leaving me alone in the living room playing with the record player while she went to have a nap for an hour or so.

I remember liking being alone at first, but then  feeling lonely and anxious. I felt safe in the way that i was safe at home. But anxious in the way that if i was all alone, maybe i did not really exist.

I remember wanting to pretend being someone else to escape the anxiety, and partly for a game. My secret game became imagining i was Kevin. ( i am a girl, so yeah... awkward!) . My brother was a teenager and my mom seemed to think him and his friends were cool and awesome. One of his friend  in particular ( kevin) really seamed to impress them.  My reasoning here was that if i was to pretend to be someone else in my mind, might as well choose someone cool everyone admires!

Being a little girl in footed pajamas was lame in the way that it didn't seem to impress anyone.  It was so unimpressive that when i was alone, i wasn't even sure i actually existed. So for one hour a day while my mom napped, I  became Kevin in my head, and in this day dream  my mom and brother and everyone liked me and admired me ( him) .

Funny in a way, pretty sad in so many ways... My Mdaydreaming changed and evolved a lot with time. (Thankfully I do not daydream about being Kevin anymore!!!)  But my first  was pretending to be this scrawny teenager  my mom and brother thought was so cool!
How about you? Do you remember your first?

[Tinkerbell]

When I was 4 years old, right after I had been sexually abused by my mother's boyfriend. On top of that my mother kept it secret from everyone. On top of that my mother showed no affection towards me. If I went downstairs she went upstairs, when I went upstairs she would go downstairs. The only time she interacted with me was to feed me, or to beat me. Which consisted of being kicked, punched or beaten with a belt or leather slippers. So Maladaptive Daydreaming was my insulation from my reality.

[Phoenix]

Hello there,

I've been daydreaming for as long as I can remember. It's almost like how children will daydream and play with toys so they can visualize, and sometimes use their current situations for daydream fuel, except I never stopped. My daydreams have become a part of me, and they are very real to me. They promise a better life and excitement no matter where I am in life.

[Louis]

I think my daydreams started when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I had a lot of stuffed animals in my bed so in the beginning I would always daydream about being their parent or sibling, but this was only in the evenings after I went to bed because that was the only time I could really act it out without people seeing it. When I was about 8 or so, I started daydreaming without acting it out, which also meant I dreamt about other things than my stuffed animals (usually I was some kind of superhero or a wizard from Harry Potter). I wasn't limited to only daydreaming in my bed anymore, so it slowly became more frequent, until it was basically the only thing I could think about. Luckily, I don't have any obvious ticks, so I can daydream pretty much whereever I want (The only thing people notice is that I space out but they usually don't care since they think I'm just normally thinking or something). From what I remember, I had a pretty happy childhood, so I don't really know where it comes from.

[Silver Swan]

I started MDD when I was 12 years old. I was in the basement watching an episode of the Original Star Trek series when I suddenly had a crush on captain Kirk, so I began giggling inappropriately, as if he were really there in the basement trying to flatter me. My MDD got stronger over the years by influence of TV shows and films, mostly involving male lead stars or characters that stole my heart. I'd get obsessed with the characters for several months, or even a couple years.

Now that I'm 32 years old, I look back at these fictional relationships I had with the characters, and then I look at my own failed love life (in real life), due to not paying attention to real live guys. I remembered finding real guys in my school NOT as sexually attractive and good looking as the imaginary characters in my head, so I seldom had any crushes on anybody in my academic classes. However, being a mature person in her 30's, I now find those erotic fantasies very ridiculous looking and not worth my time. So, I wished I had payed more attention in school and studied extremely hard...for a change.

[Paul Rapp]

For me I think it started at around age 3 or 4. It could have started earlier, but my memories from before age 3 are spotty, plus I really did not know about age and calendars before age 4. I did have an event in my life that occurred about that time does define a time milestone, and that was that we moved to a new house just a few weeks after my third birthday. All of my memories of daydreaming can be traced to the new house and not to the old one and the earliest ones were from before I started school, which was at age 4. I was already doing a lot of daydreaming by first grade.

My earliest daydreaming memories involve a character called Froggy the Gremlin, a magic frog that was a character on a TV show called Andy’s Gang (Andy Devine). I made “Mr. Froggy” an imaginary friend. I don’t remember any of the actual stories from then, I really only remember the character. A little bit later I used to play cowboy games with my older cousin and I had daydream fantasies about the two of us as cowboy characters. Tarzan movies and jungle adventures and various science fiction shows on TV were other early influences for MD fantasies and those became dominant when I went into my most active MD period in about third grade.

I actually have good memories of those fantasies and stories. I think that they were more real to me than was the real world. They were certainly a lot more fun and exciting than reality was.

[Nasir Smalls]

For me it started from the fact that most of the time I was a kid that would always stay at home. And when I used to be alone I'd always daydream. I was a dreamer all of my life that I remember. It wasn't a big deal until I grew up and started having more responsibilities.

[Tichique Luis]

It started for me at kindergarden I daydreamed about the cartoons and anime I watched

[Kina Lowes]

Wow...Mine was the result of a traumatic childhood (lots of neglect, moving around too much, trouble fitting it, narcissitic mother) It started when I was about 9 also - I first moved to the states, I am 40 also and I have a thing with elephants (like your avatar)....so weird...when i first started reading this post, I was like "Did I answer this question already"??

My life is definitely not boring, I travel a lot, I'm an entrepreneur and my work is really fun. I have fantastic friends. I recently lost a lot of weight and I'm learning a new language.   But I do have trouble with relationships. I meet these awesome gorgeous guys, but they are all emotionally unavailable. ( I discovered that seems to be my preference). We will have a torturous relationship with various degrees of closeness or flirting and I will use MD to build them up into a fantasy until eventually I become hurt and dump them and it starts all over again. My longest relationship was 6 1/2 years off and on. Actually this is the ONE area in my life I want to improve. And I feel like MD is a big factor to why I have issues in this area.

The first time I remember it, I saw some Chinese jugglers. They would juggle vases on their feet. And I started doing that. Juggling my pillow on my feet and that was my 'tic' for YEARS...all the way up til college. My first fantasies were about dating peter parker or being on Star Treck the Next generation. Having super powers and amazing all of my super friends. Now that I'm an adult, my MD focuses on real life events, real life possibilities or reliving things that happened over and over again with different endings. I don't daydream as much as I used to...And only...3 or 4 people have every noticed anything aside from me just being absent minded. And most of them didn't notice how deep it went. My own mother never new.

Chris H said:

Hi Dee, mine was the result of a traumatic childhood. I could go on about this forever. The MDD started when I was around 9 or so. I have depression, which of late seems under control. I am now in my forties, and my life is completely boring. Hence to say the MDD has been in full swing for the last few weeks. It's quite complex, I have several different characters. All of whom are linked to me. The most difficult part is how dull it makes reality.  

[Silver Swan]

My mother knows. She was very condescending when she found out. My day dreaming also focuses on real life events and adulthood. When I was a kid, it was more based on books, TV series and movies.

[Kit McDaydream]

Interesting stories.  I think my first imaginings were about 'George' from the famous five books.  My real name was 'girly' so I chose a more boyish nickname (unisex name) and insisted on being called it in real life too. In my teens my character would be based on a more popular girl who got to hang out with her favourite singers backstage and on their tour bus etc. In real life I was being bullied everyday at school. 

Later they became coping strategies as I struggled to cope with things and I started creating characters to actually be in real life, so some elements from only happening in my imaginings to being acted out in reality. I don't know if anyone else has ever done this or whether my autism has influenced how my MD has developed.  I have lived as my last character in real life too for the last 15 years. 

Ironically now my imaginings are about returning back to myself before life got so complicated! ..and trying to work out what conditions in real life would enable this to happen.  I also have an obsession with my last dog reincarnating and finding her way back to us which usually features somewhere in the imaginings daily too.

[Kina Lowes]

Same... my mother knows because I told her, but she's very narcisisstic so I'm sure she has forgotten. But I also daydreamt about characters in books and in movies when I was younger ( Like Star Trek and Spiderman). Now as an adult. It is more about things that have happened ( imagining telling off someone who treated me badly or embarrassed me). Things I want to have happen ( especially relationships). Things I wished had happened differently...It's much closer to real life events now.

Silver S...do you think maybe your moms condescension of you and your behavior may have contributed to your MDD in the first place? My mom's certainly did to me.

Silver Swan said:

My mother knows. She was very condescending when she found out. My day dreaming also focuses on real life events and adulthood. When I was a kid, it was more based on books, TV series and movies.