Do you get overly emotional over certain book/TV show/movie characters as if they were real?

[Eretaia]

Hello everyone from a 20 year-old student. I'd like to pose a question. Although I have known for MD for quite a while, my hands are shaking as I'm writing this because I finally realized that there might be something wrong with me.

At the age of eleven or twelve, I could get immersed in certain books or shows to a considerable extent; when certain character would die, I'd feel grief as if a real person died. Moreover, I'd care deeply for some of them and feel profound emotions. I was constantly thinking about them. At this period, they were there as a passive dream -  they simply existed for me without me trying to reconstruct or change the course of a book, and some time later, they became source of my active daydreaming.

The point is: my attachment to fictional characters (which usually happen to be animated as silly as it sounds) feels as a real and sincere emotion. However, my daydreams do not always include them personally - rather, they are always there as a constant presence, a guidance, and my mind thinks about them all the time. By the way, I only felt this a few times, towards a small number of characters. I never made up my own characters, instead, it was always fictional ones of others.

So, the question is: do you get overly emotional over certain book/TV show/movie characters (which are or grow to be a focus of your MD) as if they were real? I assume this question only applies to those whose source of MD are fictional characters.

[Tanya]

Tv show characters fo dominate my daydreams. Im highy addicted to csi miami
n i daydream abt.being one of cast which is quite common for csi miami fans.when eddie cibrian's
Character jesse cardoza died i couldt take his death and i cried nso bad same happend wen csi miami went
off air aftr 10 seasons.

[Silla Bakht]

I have the same problem when i watch a movie,drama or read a story my mind totally focused on that story,i made my own characters as well as catch that fictions

[Teagan Heart]

Absolutely. Sometimes when I watch a movie and that person is the hero, I pretend that they are in my life. And sometimes when I see someone abused horribly, I imagine taking them away from their situation. It's crazy I know. But the thing is is that I don't keep them with me forever. It's usually just a period of time-- just until things cool down and I can go back to normal.... or semi-normal. ha ha

[Catauxgory]

Eretaia - You’re welcome! I’m really glad you took away something helpful.

It’s important not to be hard on yourself for having this emotional split. I remember feeling that I was betraying myself, but was often confused about whether I felt I was betraying my daydream world or reality. I no longer feel this betrayal, this secret feeling of disloyalty, but I remember it made me unhappy. It really tore me up inside.

Even though you daydream and have a great deal of emotion directed toward your daydream world, you still are a human being with a life apart from your daydreams. That life might not be the one you want right now. You might not be happy with yourself, your living conditions, your environment or other things, but it IS the only real life you have.

Despite what I said about the emotional compass being inverted, I don’t believe that it ever became fully inverted. That is to say, that even as I was actively committing myself to my daydream world emotionally, I still reacted to my reality. My reactions might not have been strong. They might not even have been fully conscious to me. I might have felt them within myself as cries and whispers, but I recognized them as coming from the real me.

I realized that the whole apparatus of daydreaming was covering up, muffling, the feelings and reactions of the real me. The theory I went on was that once the apparatus of daydreaming was removed I’d be able to interact with the world without a filter of any sort – a way of being that, after so many years of daydreaming, I actually came to envy intensely. We daydreamers have been viewing the world through a murky screen coated over with the residue of our fantasies. Once polished off, we can shine with our true colors, and those true colors include those of our fantasies, because once we have had them (fantasies) we cannot un-have them. A fantasy, a daydream, is forever.

Living is terrifying for us daydreamers because our relative experienced is in dealing with everyday situations is so small, when compared with the finely-honed life skills of your average reality-dweller. At least, that was my experience. When I was just starting to press on within myself to invert the emotional compass back to reality, I felt tremendously vulnerable and constantly fearful, like a gladiator being sent out to a pack of hungry lions. That was how raw the fear was. I was terrified of reality-dwellers discovering that I had been “gone” for so long. Irrationally, I thought they would attack me and tear me apart for betraying them. In reality, of course, no one was out to get me - or even had even the foggiest idea of my “betrayal.”

Am I completely free of MD?

I have won the battle against this condition. I have waged a war within myself against daydreaming and I have come out victorious. If MD can be compared to substance abuse, then, yes, I’ve been through recovery and I’m living the post-MD life. If I am free of the impulse to daydream, it is because I have learned the hard way that daydreaming, for me, is not and cannot be a way of life. But I did not recover by just casting my daydream world aside wholesale.  I recovered by transforming my desire of What I Wanted to be Doing and How I Wanted to be Living. Once I fully embraced the fact that I wanted to live in reality, the daydreams lost their grip on me completely. It was an embrace that broke the spell.

The “wandering state” that you refer to – I think I spent years in that state, that frame of mind, trying to gather the commitment to walk back to reality, and whether I could really “make it” there, succeed,

Did I constantly question whether I would be losing everything by embracing reality and continuing to try to invert the compass? Yes.

But let me go back to the emotional tug-of-war between daydreaming and reality. Do not condemn yourself for having a simultaneous dual desire to live in both worlds. Everyone needs time to work out their journey on their own terms, and to decide what sort of terms are going to work for them as far as how much daydreaming and how much reality. But getting on good terms with both worlds, I believe, is a step in the right direction.

[Eretaia]

Hey there, Catauxgory! I'm fully aware of the fact that MD can't be eradicated by force, and that the key factor in winning this battle is slowly finding and experiencing little joys of real world. To tell you the truth, it's been three weeks that I try not to daydream actively; at first, I tired eradicating my internal world without actually trying to replace it with the real one, and it felt like living hell -  both mentally and physically; I lost the appetite, felt lethargic - I assume, because of sudden stress and excessive self-analysis and the goddamn feeling that there's no way out. And naturally, I felt empty. Still do. However, even though I wish with a burning passion that someone would just change me overnight, I'm aware that getting rid of MD is a gradual process which will take time and practice, lots of practice and I'm willing to do it. Sometimes I feel like I'm making a small progress and for a brief moment I feel like a part of reality again, but those situations are usually interrupted by daydreams, which seem to haunt me against my own will quite often and I end up feeling detached from reality again. Such an ugly feeling but I hope it'll decrease eventually. I realized that I had directed all emotions towards my internal world and left none for the external one. When I'm in real world, I do get all the tasks done successfully, but I do them automatically, like a robot, without enjoying - but I hope this realization is a starting point for me.

Anyways, what scares me is that I'm often unable to immerse into reality. Even when I'm surrounded by people and lots of external stimuli, even when I try so hard not to think about my daydreams, my mind always seems to be kind of absent, far away from here, not giving a damn about present moment, as if there's something else waiting for me, something I can't seem to make out. Does this feeling sound familiar to you?

Oh yes, my emotional compass never became fully inverted either. However, my emotions towards external world seem to have weakened in the last year - I didn't bother about friendships and never formed meaningful relationship even though I was given many chances - and I never seemed to pay attention to this until now, when I have almost nothing left. I want to (re)build the real world and real emotions, which I don't know if I ever truly had, but I feel helpless. The fact that I'm so terribly self-absorbed and overly self-aware makes me wonder if I'll ever be able to build true relationships with other people, feel the spontaneity of emotions, and be so relaxed about it like all other people are. I guess that at this point, I find it a bit implausible, but I want to give it a try. I'm not anxious around people, but I do feel kind of unnatural among them. I guess I'm just too self-aware which caused me to lose spontaneity.

Oh, please sorry for the rant. :) Once I read your post, I felt an irresistible need to vent all of this out, haha. Once again I really, really thank you from the bottom of my heart for the reassuring words and for the time you took to write all of this. I know it sounds cliche, but each word is precious to me - not only because it comes from someone who won one of the hardest inner struggles, but because you took time to read about my personal situation and reply in such a detailed manner. So thank you. A lot. It cheers me up immensely to know that some of us really made it, and that it's possible to win the battle.

[Beef]

i cried pretty much all the way through the last Harry Potter book

[Stefanie]

I am very attached to fictional characters, both from books and TV shows. If I like them, they will enter my daydreams - most of my daydreams evolve around existing fictional characters that I build my own stories around. I can get very emotional over one of my favourite characters dying up to the point to where I'm inconsolable for days and people start asking what's wrong with me. Although I also do have the habit of exploring a number of different ways to bring a beloved character back to live in my daydreams when they died on the show. I also continue Tv shows I liked that have ended in my daydreams, so they can stay with me. There's some shows that ended more than five years ago that I'm still daydreaming about.

I always know that these characters are not real, but somehow my feelings towards them are. I suffer from anxiety disorder and it just seems so much easier to me to "hang out" with fictional characters - they're way more predictable and less complicated and they don't judge me either. Of course I know that it's not a very wise thing to do and I've been trying to go among real people more often lately, but I have to force myself to do it most of the time, because I don't feel the need to be around real people when I can go through all of human emotions with fictional people just the same. 

[Amy]

The majority of characters in my daydreams actually are characters from TV and film (admittedly with extra backstory created by me). Over the past 11 years I have managed to draw together all of my favourite characters and storylines together to form one long and hellishly complicated timeline for my main character's story arc. Unfortunately, if that character is subsequently killed off in a programme the repercussions are felt within my daydreams, because I feel as though those people are my friends with whom I have formed relationships with.