Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back with our second episode about the story of
Speaker 1: Kirk Allen, or at least based on the story of
Speaker 1: Kirk Allen. Yeah, the story of Kirk Allen being a
Speaker 1: recurring element, but ultimately we're talking about, you know, imagination,
Speaker 1: We're talking about daydreams. We're talking about how we try
Speaker 1: to objectively understand the universe even as more subjective narratives
Speaker 1: are presented to us, narratives like UFOs or demons, etcetera,
Speaker 1: or traveling into the future and being a space lord exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: if you haven't heard the last episode, you should probably
Speaker 1: go and check that one out first, where we tell
Speaker 1: the whole story of Kirk Allen. We're gonna be following
Speaker 1: up on some of the threads from it and this
Speaker 1: one and pursuing some research on the idea of malad
Speaker 1: active day dreaming, because the idea with Kirk Allen is that, essentially,
Speaker 1: the short version is you had a guy with a
Speaker 1: with a very important job, like a nuclear physicist for
Speaker 1: a government institution, that was daydreaming so much that it
Speaker 1: became a problem that his employers said, we want you
Speaker 1: to go talk to a professional about this. Now, the
Speaker 1: story goes, at least as it's presented by his therapist,
Speaker 1: who was writing later and fictionalizing elements of the story,
Speaker 1: both to protect the identity of the patient and as
Speaker 1: far as we know, maybe maybe not also embellishing the
Speaker 1: story to make it a better story. We don't know,
Speaker 1: But the story goes that kirk Allen the pseudonym for
Speaker 1: this patient, that he was referred to Robert Linden, or
Speaker 1: the therapist, and that Lindener became so involved in kirk
Speaker 1: Allen's beliefs that he could travel into the future and
Speaker 1: in his mind and be a space lord and go
Speaker 1: from planet to planet and explore all these technologies and
Speaker 1: galactic civilizations, that he got so involved in that that
Speaker 1: he started to believe it himself. And then it took
Speaker 1: kirk Allen admitting that he made the whole thing up
Speaker 1: and didn't actually believe any of it, to snap the
Speaker 1: therapist out of believing in the delusion. And it makes
Speaker 1: for a great story, like it illustrates like the power
Speaker 1: the contagious nature of of of of a compelling fiction exactly.
Speaker 1: But today we wanted to explore this other element of it.
Speaker 1: So if we go with the story and we assume
Speaker 1: that Kirk Allen never did believe any of what he
Speaker 1: was saying, He never actually believed he was a space lord.
Speaker 1: He just spent a lot of time fantasizing about it,
Speaker 1: though he can tell the difference between his fantasy and reality.
Speaker 1: What would that situation be. Imagine You've got this guy,
Speaker 1: He's doing important nuclear physics or whatever other kind of
Speaker 1: government research, and they can't keep him on task because
Speaker 1: he's always thinking about how he's going to finish his
Speaker 1: paper on the hyperdrive thruster that will get him to
Speaker 1: tow St nine or whatever. Yeah. I mean, the cool
Speaker 1: thing about all this, and I think ultimately the fascinating
Speaker 1: part about it, is that we I think we can
Speaker 1: all relate on some level to the you know, the
Speaker 1: the attractive power of daydreaming. I mean we we we
Speaker 1: all do it, and certainly we all did it when
Speaker 1: we were children. Uh. I mean, I I've always had
Speaker 1: a pretty active imagination as a kid. I was I
Speaker 1: was content to pace around the backyard. I would generally
Speaker 1: have a red or a green rubber band in my hand,
Speaker 1: and I would just daydream a litany of imagined worlds,
Speaker 1: inspired you know by typical things that are going to
Speaker 1: inspire a kid, you know, the TV shows, movies, cartoons
Speaker 1: and action figures, that sort of thing. And uh, and
Speaker 1: I think everybody in my family probably thought I was
Speaker 1: a little bit weird because of it, but they, you know,
Speaker 1: they tolerated it, even only so they could continue to
Speaker 1: make fun of me as an adult. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: then to their to everyone's credit, they encouraged my creative
Speaker 1: activities later on in life that employed much of the
Speaker 1: same energy, just without the rubber band and all the pacing. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe I still do some of the pacing.
Speaker 1: But you do the pacing if you're not noticed. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I you know, it's it's good for one to get up,
Speaker 1: um all the time during work, not trying to call
Speaker 1: you out. I paced two. Well like for well, one
Speaker 1: thing I do now is I I do a lot
Speaker 1: of swimming, and while I'm swimming, I am inevitably doing
Speaker 1: some form of imaginative thoughts, some sort of daydreaming I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about, say, uh, you know, the fiction podcast that
Speaker 1: I'm putting together here for how stuff works and sort
Speaker 1: of plotting that out. Uh, it's and it's all sort
Speaker 1: of an experiment in like constructive daydreaming. Right, if I'm
Speaker 1: lucky enough to visit a beach, that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that occupies my mind on long walks, like I
Speaker 1: I love those times in my life when I'm able
Speaker 1: to not worry about the future, you know, or or
Speaker 1: or you know, hang up over the past, and instead
Speaker 1: just daydream about something uh, completely different. Well, as I've
Speaker 1: said recently on the show, I think narrative is a
Speaker 1: sacred retreat. But it's not just to sacred retreat when
Speaker 1: you're reading the narratives of others. It's certainly a sacred
Speaker 1: retreat when you're composing your own. Yeah. Now I have
Speaker 1: to say that I'm I'm fortunate to have outlets for
Speaker 1: my creativity and uh, and I'm also very fortunate that
Speaker 1: daydreaming and imagination doesn't negatively impact my life and at
Speaker 1: least currently uh and not everyone though, can make these claims. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's a lot of what we're gonna be focusing
Speaker 1: on today is like when when when it crosses that
Speaker 1: line when daydreaming goes over the line and becomes something
Speaker 1: not not so positive but more destructive to people's lives,
Speaker 1: you know. Thinking about my own childhood, I can specifically
Speaker 1: remember the process of trying to prolong or reinter dreams
Speaker 1: that I had exited by waking up. Did you ever
Speaker 1: have this experience? I remember, in particular this one dream
Speaker 1: I had where I found a tunnel in my closet
Speaker 1: and crawling through the tunnel, it went to a beach
Speaker 1: where there was a girl there who was a friend
Speaker 1: of mine, and she could turn into a fish, I think,
Speaker 1: or a dolphin or a cat. But I could also
Speaker 1: in this dream swing around on tree branches by using
Speaker 1: a whip like Indiana Jones, And that was just the
Speaker 1: coolest thing ever, because I loved Indiana Jones, and I
Speaker 1: especially loved the swinging action. That sounds amazing. That that
Speaker 1: reminds me of how I once had a Rocketeer dream.
Speaker 1: Only once did I have this dream where I was
Speaker 1: flying with the Rocketeers jet pack and it was just
Speaker 1: so beautiful. It was just so breathtaking, and I've never
Speaker 1: had that dream again. Yeah, I remember this just being
Speaker 1: an overwhelmingly fun dream I had a morphin friend, and
Speaker 1: I could swing around in tree branches like like Indiana Jones,
Speaker 1: and for some reason it was just so fun that
Speaker 1: when I woke up, I was like, oh, I've got
Speaker 1: to get back there, and I tried to re enter it,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't do it. I tried to go back
Speaker 1: to sleep again and dream the same dream, but I
Speaker 1: couldn't make myself And I remember trying really hard to
Speaker 1: imagine having the same dream again while I was awake,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't really do that either, at least not
Speaker 1: with the same intensity. And I know this wasn't the
Speaker 1: only time I tried to recreate a dream state while
Speaker 1: I was awake. This is just one really vivid one
Speaker 1: that I remember. And I think this impulse to try
Speaker 1: so hard to imagine myself back into a dream sort
Speaker 1: of is part of what led me to become interested
Speaker 1: in fiction writing. Because while dreams always fade very quickly
Speaker 1: in memory, even very vivid ones tend too if you
Speaker 1: don't talk about them or write them down after you
Speaker 1: wake up. Imaginary scenarios coded down in writing those are permanent,
Speaker 1: and you can re enter them with full fidelity at
Speaker 1: any time. You know your story reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of HP Lovecrafts, The dream Quest of Unknown Cats. I
Speaker 1: don't know that it's it's a wonderful and imaginative tale,
Speaker 1: very unlike most of his. It's one of his dream stories,
Speaker 1: so it's it's it's more fantasy than horror, though it
Speaker 1: has you know, the horror elements for sure. But the
Speaker 1: basic idea is that a dream or a man dreams
Speaker 1: a dream so beautiful that the gods, the elder beings
Speaker 1: deny it to him, and hasked to go on a
Speaker 1: quest to try and reclaim that dream. Whoa is it
Speaker 1: beautiful or or sad and melancholy? That that's so much
Speaker 1: of what life is is not not necessarily chasing a
Speaker 1: new experience that you haven't had, but trying to recapture
Speaker 1: a perfect experience, you remember, Yeah, it's true. It kind
Speaker 1: of gets to the heart of the power of nostalgia, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, in our previous episode, we we talked a
Speaker 1: good a good deal about Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted
Speaker 1: World because that was the context in which we read
Speaker 1: this original story about Kirk Allen. Yeah, and uh and
Speaker 1: and Sagan has a wonderful quote here just about fantasy
Speaker 1: and reality that I wanted to read, He says, quote.
Speaker 1: Out of all these contending propensities and child rearing practices,
Speaker 1: some people emerge with an intact ability to fantasize and
Speaker 1: a history extending well into adulthood of confabulation. Others grow
Speaker 1: up believing that everyone who doesn't know the difference between
Speaker 1: reality and fantasy is crazy. Most of us are somewhere
Speaker 1: in between. That's a good point. I mean, I so
Speaker 1: obviously somebody who is U two wrapped up in their
Speaker 1: in their fantasies, in their own head, that person is
Speaker 1: obviously going to be having trouble. And when you you
Speaker 1: encounter somebody like that, you can often recognize it. But
Speaker 1: I think equally, you don't trust somebody at the far
Speaker 1: opposite end of the spectrum who just has no tolerance
Speaker 1: for imagination. You know, you sometimes meet people like this.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I saw a guy at um It was
Speaker 1: a tiki bar in uh in, Hawaii, and he was
Speaker 1: ordering a drink, probably a mind hie or something, but
Speaker 1: he had specific directions for the servery. He said, he said,
Speaker 1: bring me one of these, but no umbrellas, no fancy
Speaker 1: mug just makes you basically make this drink as boring
Speaker 1: as possible, no fun for me, no umbrellas, Like I
Speaker 1: refuse to pretend that there's a tiny man living on
Speaker 1: the surface of my drink that needs shade from the
Speaker 1: sun exactly. It's like, why are you even here if
Speaker 1: you're if you're not here to engage in in funny
Speaker 1: umbrella drinks, that's a tiki bar. Heretic right there. But
Speaker 1: let's come back to just the subject of day dreaming
Speaker 1: and creativity. Robert you know who had some interesting thoughts
Speaker 1: about daydreaming and creativity, Good old Sigmund Freud, who I
Speaker 1: bet he did dr joy So he talked about this
Speaker 1: in a nineteen o seven essay called Creative Writers in Daydreaming,
Speaker 1: And I just want to preempt please do not take
Speaker 1: this discussion as an endorsement in general of Freudianism. While
Speaker 1: Freud is of course a very important figure to read
Speaker 1: in the history of ideas, a lot of his influence
Speaker 1: on psychology has given way too much more rigorous, more
Speaker 1: explicitly science based practices. I think these days Freud is
Speaker 1: more worth reading in the vein of thinking about him
Speaker 1: as a kind of like philosopher or something. But so
Speaker 1: Freud starts with one of those great questions that we
Speaker 1: might sometimes think of as too simple bowl or too
Speaker 1: fundamental to actually ask out loud. The Robert. You might
Speaker 1: have heard this one before. Somebody knows you write fiction,
Speaker 1: or they read one of your stories and they ask you, Robert,
Speaker 1: where do you get your ideas? How do you think
Speaker 1: up what to get the characters to say and to do?
Speaker 1: Have you ever been asked this? Yeah, I've been asked
Speaker 1: versions of this before. I've been asked this too. I
Speaker 1: was actually asked it fairly recently, and it's always struck
Speaker 1: me as a bizarre question because I thought, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I would think the answer is obvious. It's like I
Speaker 1: get ideas by using my imagination and imagining what the
Speaker 1: character would do. But the fact that some people end
Speaker 1: up asking this question of other people indicates that obviously,
Speaker 1: not everybody has the same propensity for imagining fictional characters
Speaker 1: and places and scenarios and all that. So to some
Speaker 1: people it comes more naturally than it does to others.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm always reminded of the subject of a fantasia,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that not everyone can form mental images,
Speaker 1: which doesn't directly relate to what we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: but it's a reminder of just how different our brains
Speaker 1: can be. So I can you know, see why someone
Speaker 1: might not initially grasp how an imagined character uh comes
Speaker 1: to speak or act uh, and they might find it
Speaker 1: harder still to understand how these fictional characters that people
Speaker 1: dream up may well think or act in ways that
Speaker 1: the imagineer does not expect. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things I noticed in writing
Speaker 1: is that the process of creativity, at least for me,
Speaker 1: is very highly uh shaped by the act of recording
Speaker 1: the creative process. So it's like writing a story is
Speaker 1: very different than just trying to think out a story
Speaker 1: in my head. Once once it turns into words, then
Speaker 1: you realize, oh, all this has got to change. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I often feel like I have two processes that
Speaker 1: I'm working with. One is that that day dreaming while
Speaker 1: I'm swimming laps or whatever. But then there's the process
Speaker 1: of actually writing things, and things may change drastically, uh,
Speaker 1: depending on the demands of that process. Just to point
Speaker 1: out quickly, also before we move on, you mentioned the
Speaker 1: idea that not everybody can form images in their head
Speaker 1: as one possible uh factor affecting whether people can compose fiction.
Speaker 1: But we've heard from people who are fiction writers who
Speaker 1: have a fantasition. Know, yeah, I I don't. I bring
Speaker 1: it up more as just an example of how our
Speaker 1: brains are different. Not that it would would impact, it
Speaker 1: would change, not it would change the way one composes fiction,
Speaker 1: I think. But but yeah, certainly someone of the fantasia
Speaker 1: can and and they do write fiction. They do, uh
Speaker 1: come up with fabulous ideas. Um. But yeah, we we
Speaker 1: we often fall into that trap of thinking that everyone
Speaker 1: has a brain more or less like mine. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: you know, maybe it's it's it's it's you know it.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's more powerful than mine, or maybe it's not
Speaker 1: as finely tuned as mine. But all our brains are
Speaker 1: basically the same, and an example like a fantasia just
Speaker 1: reminds you know, this is not the at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're exactly right. So Freud began by observing this idea
Speaker 1: that not all brains are the same, and that not
Speaker 1: all brains are the same in terms of ability to
Speaker 1: be creative, to come up with creative stories, and specifically
Speaker 1: for the purpose of this conversation. We are talking about
Speaker 1: creativity in terms of like making up stories, not the
Speaker 1: more generalized idea of creativity, right, which can well and
Speaker 1: does entail things that are not like you know, literature
Speaker 1: major creativity. I mean, certainly there is creativity within science,
Speaker 1: there's creativity within programming, etcetera. There's creativity and getting a
Speaker 1: piece of meat out of a cage trap exactly. But
Speaker 1: no way, So we're talking about like coming up with ideas,
Speaker 1: like creative storytelling and stuff. So so, Freud says, you know,
Speaker 1: even non creative people do have some experience with the
Speaker 1: thinking of creative writers. Even if you're one of these
Speaker 1: people who asks how do you come up with your ideas? Well,
Speaker 1: how do you know what the characters should do? These people,
Speaker 1: Freud says, do have experience with that because it's in
Speaker 1: the imagination based play of their childhood. Think back on
Speaker 1: your childhood, what was it like to play pretend? And
Speaker 1: he writes, quote, might we not say that every child
Speaker 1: at play behaves like a creative writer, and that he
Speaker 1: creates a world of his own, or rather rearranges the
Speaker 1: things of his world in a new way which pleases him.
Speaker 1: It would be wrong to think he does not take
Speaker 1: the world seriously. On the contrary, he takes his play
Speaker 1: very seriously, and he expends large amounts of emotion on it.
Speaker 1: The opposite of play is not what is serious, but
Speaker 1: what is real? Might we not say that every creative
Speaker 1: writer is a giant baby? I'm kidding, well, I I
Speaker 1: agree with that last part of what Freud says, because
Speaker 1: play play is a departure from constraints, not a departure
Speaker 1: from stakes. There's nothing in the world more serious and
Speaker 1: important than what happens in a child's game. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you know from experience. If the floor is lava, the
Speaker 1: floor is lava. Yeah. Though, I have to say, play
Speaker 1: is definitely a topic that demands its own episode at
Speaker 1: some point. I mean, there's so much going on when
Speaker 1: a child plays, even when an adult engages in play.
Speaker 1: And then of course we have other mammals that engage
Speaker 1: in play as well, especially when they're young. Totally true.
Speaker 1: So Freud says that the creative writer just extends this
Speaker 1: type of play into adulthood and then uses the help
Speaker 1: of writing to record the play. Otherwise, the process is
Speaker 1: very similar. The creative writer creates a world of fantasy
Speaker 1: and then takes it very seriously by investing huge amounts
Speaker 1: of genuine emotion into it, but keeps it separated sharply
Speaker 1: from the constraints of reality. So what's happening here? Why
Speaker 1: does the day dreamer or the fiction writer do this?
Speaker 1: You know? Why does the play in the imagination happen?
Speaker 1: And Freud notes something. He says, what's common to almost
Speaker 1: every single work of fiction. Well, we gotta have a hero,
Speaker 1: right exactly the song says we need a hero, right.
Speaker 1: I'm holding out for a hero for Freudian reasons. There
Speaker 1: now this. Obviously, there's all kinds of fiction out there
Speaker 1: in the world today. There's experimental fiction and fiction that
Speaker 1: breaks every rule in the book, right, but most fiction
Speaker 1: still does abide by this. You've gotta have a hero
Speaker 1: around which the interest of the story is centered and
Speaker 1: to which the author wishes to engender the audience's sympathies.
Speaker 1: And another thing he points out is that the hero is,
Speaker 1: by necessity of the plot invulnerable. The reader can always
Speaker 1: trust that the hero will not be killed in chapter two,
Speaker 1: or else there would be no story, or at least
Speaker 1: that's what it's like as an adult. I feel like
Speaker 1: any time I get my son to watch any time
Speaker 1: we introduce him to a new film. Um, he does
Speaker 1: not realize that the main character is going to make
Speaker 1: it to the end of a children's film. Man, Like,
Speaker 1: I wish I could go back to that. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: I know it's it's at once uh amazing and frustrating,
Speaker 1: because on one hand it's like, wow, he is experiencing
Speaker 1: this film with such raw uh you know, vulnerability and
Speaker 1: the other and then on the other side, it's like,
Speaker 1: I just want you to be able to watch Muana
Speaker 1: and uh and with the with the family. We just
Speaker 1: want to make it to the end of this movie.
Speaker 1: It's just a Disney princess movie. We should be able
Speaker 1: to handle it, don't you dare take that magic away
Speaker 1: from him? That No, that's a beautiful thing. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I can't believe it. I remember what that was like
Speaker 1: back before I understood all of the like cliches of
Speaker 1: story structure, when every when, every narrative was a radical
Speaker 1: surprise to me. Things aren't quite like that anymore, and
Speaker 1: I and I wish I could return to that mind state.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Sorry, going back to Freud, so Freud notices
Speaker 1: that the hero is always invulnerable by necessity of the plot,
Speaker 1: and also the hero enjoys unrealistic good fortune in like
Speaker 1: love and romance. So Freud writes, quote, through this revealing
Speaker 1: characteristic of invulnerability, we can immediately recognize his majesty, the ego,
Speaker 1: the hero alike of every day dream and every story.
Speaker 1: It's probably telling about the kind of fiction I read.
Speaker 1: But I can't remember the last time I read something
Speaker 1: where the protagonist had great fortune in love in romance,
Speaker 1: I feel like, I feel like they're mostly having a
Speaker 1: pretty bad time. Well, I think if you take the
Speaker 1: long view, okay, when the stories resolve, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of stories where people go through a lot of
Speaker 1: tragedy and then in the end that everything comes out right.
Speaker 1: All right, I'll get back to you on that. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do a full cataloging of of recent reads for that.
Speaker 1: What's your Freudian analysis of the ar Scott Baker books
Speaker 1: that everybody has a pretty tough time with relationships. For
Speaker 1: starters is something about death drive maybe maybe anyway, So
Speaker 1: ultimately Freud gets Freudian right. He says that both the
Speaker 1: daydream and the act of creative writing, which are really
Speaker 1: sort of one and the same, thing realized through different means.
Speaker 1: He says these are the result of unconscious memories which
Speaker 1: give rise to an unfulfilled wish, and the wishes then
Speaker 1: fulfilled through the daydream or the act of creative writing,
Speaker 1: but in a way that is tempered about the social
Speaker 1: and moral restraints imposed by society. This obviously is you know,
Speaker 1: classic Freudian kind of stuff. But you don't have to
Speaker 1: give any credence to this repressed childhood memory part, which
Speaker 1: is probably nonsense to appreciate. There may be some insight
Speaker 1: in the earlier parts about drawing this connection between the
Speaker 1: creative process and what's going on in daydreaming. Oh, by
Speaker 1: the way, if anyone would want, anyone wants like a
Speaker 1: deeper exploration of like early childhood trauma and Freudian ideas. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's an older episode of stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: about the work work of hr Geiger and some Freudian
Speaker 1: explanations for his His visual style was Gieger or Freudian. Uh.
Speaker 1: I don't think it was quite a Freudian, but at
Speaker 1: least one major commentator on his work was and pointed
Speaker 1: to a lot and basically the the death and birth imagery. Uh.
Speaker 1: That that that weird. Uh, you know, bio mechanical synthesis
Speaker 1: of things that are both the vibrantly alive and just
Speaker 1: unredeemably dead. Interesting. You know, I can actually see a
Speaker 1: redemptive arc of of Freudiani is um maybe not so
Speaker 1: much as a as the best tool for for psychology,
Speaker 1: but maybe as like a literary and artistic criticism school. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it comes back to what you said earlier about
Speaker 1: Freud being perhaps more useful today if you think of
Speaker 1: him as a philosopher and I and I do think
Speaker 1: there's something to his insight here, like drawing this connection
Speaker 1: between daydreaming and the creative impulse in order and and
Speaker 1: and appreciating that the story spinning impulse, whether it's in
Speaker 1: creative writing or simple daydreaming, is psychologically important, and it
Speaker 1: does in many cases fill some psychological need and provide
Speaker 1: some psychological benefit. But as we're exploring today, can spill
Speaker 1: over into territory that's clearly not beneficial, such as in
Speaker 1: the case of Kirk Allen, like we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: where it was interfering with his work enough that his
Speaker 1: superior has got in touch with Lindner, or in many
Speaker 1: cases of what has come to be known as maladaptive
Speaker 1: day dreaming. And we will explore that more when we
Speaker 1: come back from break. Thank thank alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: now adaptive now adaptive daydreaming. It seems pretty obvious, right,
Speaker 1: daydreaming that is uh, that is that is maladaptive. That
Speaker 1: is that is probably not having a good influence on
Speaker 1: your life. Things are out of balance because of your daydreaming. Right.
Speaker 1: It's a term coined by the Israeli clinical psychologist Elie Summer,
Speaker 1: and Summer defines the term to mean quote, extensive fantasy
Speaker 1: activity that replaces human interaction and or interferes with academic, interpersonal,
Speaker 1: or vocational functioning. So essentially, it is fantasizing that interferes
Speaker 1: with your life. And there's actually been kind of a
Speaker 1: renaissance of attention to this subject just in the past
Speaker 1: couple of years. Yeah, there's in particular, there's a there's
Speaker 1: an excellent episode of the MPR podcast Invisibility. Uh have
Speaker 1: you listened to in Visibilia? No? I haven't. Well, I
Speaker 1: listened to a little clip from this episode, but that's all.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful series, and there's one episode in particular
Speaker 1: that discusses the story of a forty nine year old
Speaker 1: suburban mother who they referred to as em who's rich
Speaker 1: in her world, becomes a secret addiction that she keeps
Speaker 1: from her family. So she So it's not just that
Speaker 1: she's escaping into her her day dreams, you know, while
Speaker 1: she's driving to work, or while she's swimming laps or
Speaker 1: what have you. Uh No, she's making up excuses and
Speaker 1: cover stories to go off and dream in this world. Right. So,
Speaker 1: so this is an adult living a mostly normal life,
Speaker 1: but she engages in elaborate fantasies about space adventures and
Speaker 1: saving the Earth and getting sucked into a black hole
Speaker 1: and all this. And she's got fictional companions who are
Speaker 1: her her fictional friends, and she sometimes does this for
Speaker 1: multiple hours a day. And there's one part that I
Speaker 1: found very moving where she mentions, one thing about these
Speaker 1: fantasy worlds is that you know you're going to be
Speaker 1: understood in them because all the characters are you. On
Speaker 1: one hand, that's beautiful, but then I also I think
Speaker 1: of like characters that I've created, and I feel like
Speaker 1: most of them probably would not tolerate me. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if they really would understand me or not.
Speaker 1: You need to create more sympathetic characters. Probably so, probably so.
Speaker 1: So you can hear just from that that you know
Speaker 1: that she she can go to this place to be understood.
Speaker 1: So it obviously serves some purpose for her. You know,
Speaker 1: it helps her cope and it helps her feel better
Speaker 1: in a way. But it also you know, she wonders
Speaker 1: if this is doing more harm than good in her life, right,
Speaker 1: because if if you have to spend all this time
Speaker 1: in secret doing this thing that you keep secret from
Speaker 1: your family, I mean this, this is generally not healthy
Speaker 1: behavior and it's going to lead to a lot of
Speaker 1: negative effects. So what does it mean for daydreaming to
Speaker 1: become a problem, a real problem, on the level of
Speaker 1: a disorder that people would want to seek professional help
Speaker 1: to cure. Rob And I don't know if you share
Speaker 1: this bias, but I feel like in reading about the subject,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's been really hard for me
Speaker 1: to get around is a bias I have to think
Speaker 1: about day dreaming as a just inherently very good and
Speaker 1: admirable thing. Yeah, I agree, because I, for one am
Speaker 1: a daydream believer, so I'm gonna always side with the
Speaker 1: daydream I was just looking at a meme on the
Speaker 1: Internet that was like has a unicorn on it and
Speaker 1: it says, don't quit your daydream I mean, and that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be a whimsical but encouraging thing to say. Like,
Speaker 1: I associate daydreaming with the character trait of imagination, which
Speaker 1: most of us view is a good thing. I certainly do.
Speaker 1: And think about this, Robert. Imagine you're picking up a
Speaker 1: new novel and there's a young character in the story
Speaker 1: who's introduced as always daydreaming, daydreaming through classes in school
Speaker 1: or something. Do you expect this character to turn out
Speaker 1: to be a hero or a villain. I'd say they
Speaker 1: are either the hero, or they are going about to
Speaker 1: be tragically transformed into the villain, or they're just an
Speaker 1: introductory character that's going to be killed by a villainous
Speaker 1: force before we move on to the actual protagonists. Well,
Speaker 1: no matter what you're they're sympathetic at this. Yes, definitely,
Speaker 1: day day dream nous is an inherently sympathetic trait. But
Speaker 1: I think this is because we usually think about it
Speaker 1: in several contexts. Number One, it's primarily an activity of
Speaker 1: children and the young. Would you agree with that, Yes,
Speaker 1: If nothing else, that is often seen as you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of a childlike quality, right Yeah. Number two,
Speaker 1: I'd say it's usually done in a positive sense of
Speaker 1: aspiration and ambition. Like in fictional narratives, daydreaming about a
Speaker 1: different kind of life is often foreshadowing that that character
Speaker 1: will actually later get to do those things that they
Speaker 1: day dreamed about. Number three. At least in fiction, it's
Speaker 1: usually grounded within an otherwise functional set of relationships and
Speaker 1: behavior patterns. It's not usually presented as something that keeps
Speaker 1: people from doing what's right or having relationships right there,
Speaker 1: daydreaming is their escape from there, from from their daily troubles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the fourth part. The fourth part is that
Speaker 1: it's usually brought about by unfair external constraints, Like a
Speaker 1: child is in an intellectually deadening grammar class and it
Speaker 1: and it causes that child to say, it's our young
Speaker 1: heroine to sit there dreaming about, you know, shooting a
Speaker 1: bow off the back of a horse or about space
Speaker 1: adventures because she's in this horribly boring, mind numbing scenario.
Speaker 1: I certainly feel all of this in general, and so
Speaker 1: this is this episode is certainly not to cast a
Speaker 1: negative light on all forms of daydreaming, because there are
Speaker 1: clearly lots of cases where daydreaming is great, but there
Speaker 1: are also plenty of cases we've come to understand where
Speaker 1: daydreaming goes beyond a harmless exercise of imagination and it
Speaker 1: becomes a destructive obsession, causing harm to the dreamer and
Speaker 1: to the people around them. Yeah. I mean, I'd say
Speaker 1: if daydreaming prevents one from being present when one should
Speaker 1: be present, or when one wishes to be present, then
Speaker 1: could certainly be seen as a problem. You know, I
Speaker 1: think it's one of those, Uh, it could be viewed
Speaker 1: as one of those chains of iron, chains of gold situations, Right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're not present with a loved one due to
Speaker 1: worries over past or future events. That's one thing, But
Speaker 1: isn't it still just as bad as you if you're
Speaker 1: half zoning out during a conversation with a loved one
Speaker 1: because there's a space battle going on in your head.
Speaker 1: It's a fantasy, much in the same way that many
Speaker 1: of our worries are ultimately fantasies about things going wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a form of daydreaming as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: coupled with say, fantasy is about say winning the lottery
Speaker 1: or finding This is when I still do all the time.
Speaker 1: I think it's from from watching various like kidnapping movies.
Speaker 1: But I'll think, what if I happened upon a garbage
Speaker 1: can and there's like a like a drop off of
Speaker 1: money in the garbage and then I get to take
Speaker 1: off with the money and not of course I won't
Speaker 1: be killed by the hitmen or the kidnappers or what
Speaker 1: have you. Uh, surely I'll get away with the money
Speaker 1: I just found in the trash can. But it's a
Speaker 1: stupid fantasy that's still like, uh, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: dwell on it, but it still flies through my head
Speaker 1: every now and then two or three times a week tops.
Speaker 1: You find yourself checking garbage can sometimes. I mean I
Speaker 1: don't actually dig in them, but I you know, I
Speaker 1: don't go looking for the money. But for some reason
Speaker 1: lean and peak in a in a sense like this,
Speaker 1: just this stupid fantasy will will will rear its head
Speaker 1: for just a moment, uh, without me even you know,
Speaker 1: really thinking about it. One thing I find is obviously
Speaker 1: media influences what kinds of things we daydream about. Uh,
Speaker 1: did you notice a lot of people, including yourself during
Speaker 1: say the late two thousands, when zombie movies were everywhere,
Speaker 1: constantly thinking about the best place to get to defend
Speaker 1: from a zombie attack. Oh yeah, I mean that just
Speaker 1: that falls into sort of h worst case disaster fantasizing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, I'd want to be on top of
Speaker 1: that building right there, and here's what I'd want to
Speaker 1: have with me, And mercifully the zombie craze has has
Speaker 1: somewhat died down. I think people are thinking about that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Less, I'm still wondering Freudian explanations to
Speaker 1: the side, like why do we do that? What's going
Speaker 1: on in our brains when we day dream? Like, so
Speaker 1: you're just hanging out, maybe waiting to meet a friend
Speaker 1: or something like that, and then you start thinking, like,
Speaker 1: what would be the best building around here to defend
Speaker 1: from a zombie attack? What's what's going on in your brain?
Speaker 1: Then well, this actually brings us back to something we've
Speaker 1: discussed on the show plenty of times before, the default
Speaker 1: mode network. I was looking at a two thousand, seventeen
Speaker 1: University of Cambridge study that found that the brain network
Speaker 1: previously associated with daydreaming, that the default mode network also
Speaker 1: seemed to play a role, an important role in allowing
Speaker 1: us to perform tasks on autopilot. Autopilot so like when
Speaker 1: you are say, unconstabed that like highway hypnosis kind of thing, yeah,
Speaker 1: or I'm yeah doing the dishwasher, you know, or taking
Speaker 1: taking clothes to the taking the laundry to the washing machine,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Things you've done so many times
Speaker 1: that you just kind of zone out and you're thinking
Speaker 1: about space battles or the lottery or what have you. Um.
Speaker 1: The researchers here were also very interested in this because
Speaker 1: abnormal activity in the default mode network has been linked
Speaker 1: to an array of disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit,
Speaker 1: hyperactivity disorder, and disorders of consciousness. And this study in
Speaker 1: particular found that the default mode network plays an important
Speaker 1: role in allowing us to switch to autopilot once we
Speaker 1: are familiar with a task. So it seems fitting that
Speaker 1: the default mode network should emerge again in an episode
Speaker 1: on Daydreaming. We've discussed it quite a bit in the past,
Speaker 1: as as is, this is where we find so much
Speaker 1: of the worry and anxiety that we seek to escape
Speaker 1: through flow states. Um, you know, such as a creative
Speaker 1: activity like of writing or or would carving or yoga
Speaker 1: or anything like like this, um, as well as through
Speaker 1: meditation or you know, some other kind of meditative activity.
Speaker 1: The default mode network activity is also linked to difficulty
Speaker 1: in sleeping in new environments. You know, it's just kind
Speaker 1: of totally find this to be true. Yeah, So you
Speaker 1: have just like this heightened narrative of things that have
Speaker 1: gone wrong and things that might go wrong. And I
Speaker 1: feel like myself especially, so much of my my life
Speaker 1: comes down to trying to to turn that that the
Speaker 1: volume down on that network. You never get a good
Speaker 1: night's sleep the first time you're somewhere new. Yeah. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: Daniel Koneman proposed in his book Thinking Fast and Slow
Speaker 1: that we use two systems to make decisions, a rational
Speaker 1: system for calculated decisions and a fast system for intuitive decisions.
Speaker 1: And this Cambridge study argued that it's the latter system,
Speaker 1: the fast system, that may be linked with the default
Speaker 1: mode network. So it sounds as if dreaming is kind
Speaker 1: of a it's kind of a mistake of cognition, right.
Speaker 1: A byproduct of it, at any rate are predictive software
Speaker 1: to envision not only extreme cases of joy or horror,
Speaker 1: but impossible fantasies. Fantasies they may not even involve us,
Speaker 1: you know. But that's now that's considering standard daydreaming, which,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, is extremely common. I mean, almost everybody
Speaker 1: does it. Just to cite a couple of figures on that.
Speaker 1: For one thing, in the book day Dreaming in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, Singer reported that nine percent of normal, non
Speaker 1: clinical adults who were educated and living in the United
Speaker 1: States day daydreamed at least every day. And so that
Speaker 1: kind of thing happens most when the person is alone. Right,
Speaker 1: you are, say, laying in bed at night, getting ready
Speaker 1: to go to sleep, and you start to daydream. You imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, scenarios, you imagine fantasies, Your mind wanders, oh wow,
Speaker 1: well mind mind does it far more often than that? Well,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, but I meant nine percent of people
Speaker 1: at least do this one a day. Um, And there
Speaker 1: there's some evidence that it happens even more often. There's
Speaker 1: a really good article in the Atlantic from that I'll
Speaker 1: come back to a few times in this episode, called
Speaker 1: When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life by Jane Biggelson, and Tina
Speaker 1: Kelly from its April and the authors there speak to
Speaker 1: a University of Minnesota psychologist named Eric Klinger who has
Speaker 1: done a lot of important research on mind wandering, fantasy,
Speaker 1: and daydreaming, and Clinger says that quote, daydreaming accounts for
Speaker 1: about half of the average person's thoughts, amounting to about
Speaker 1: two thousand segments a day. Oh wow, that's that's quite
Speaker 1: a lot. Does that match with your number? I mean,
Speaker 1: try to think about how many times a day do
Speaker 1: you find yourself daydreaming? I mean the the like, the
Speaker 1: really critical way of putting this is that we are
Speaker 1: off task like half the time? Right, Yeah, do you
Speaker 1: ever find yourself daydreaming while you're sitting right here in
Speaker 1: the podcast studio? And I'm talking it's generally less daydreamed.
Speaker 1: I feel if my mind drifts during podcasting, it's more
Speaker 1: like worry based, you know, like I mean a bad kind.
Speaker 1: So but I'm not I'm I'm not going to think
Speaker 1: about space battles because ultimately our show is the space
Speaker 1: battle show. Like this, this is a this, this show
Speaker 1: is an escape. So Robert, you're gonna make me cry,
Speaker 1: warming my heart over here. But the podcast booth is
Speaker 1: not airtight. The worries in the fear is still managed
Speaker 1: to creep them. Well, obviously there's no way to totally
Speaker 1: keep them out. And that's one thing. I mean, one
Speaker 1: difference that I'm already seeing here is the difference between
Speaker 1: the idea of fleeting mind wandering and moments of daydreaming.
Speaker 1: I mean, if if a person is having about two
Speaker 1: thousand segments of day dreaming a day, those can't last
Speaker 1: very long, just by the math of time, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like the money and the garbage
Speaker 1: can like daydreams that are they're regular, but they're just
Speaker 1: so flee eating that you you don't it's almost like
Speaker 1: they're not even occurring. They're they're really just like background static.
Speaker 1: But when we think back to the story of m
Speaker 1: or to some of the people that we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about in a minute, um, it's clear that they're
Speaker 1: not just having like a moment of a fleeting day
Speaker 1: dream that comes for a second and then goes and
Speaker 1: then comes back a few minutes later and goes again.
Speaker 1: They are having prolonged, involved, continuous fantasies that's spin out
Speaker 1: at that that spin out stories that have some sense
Speaker 1: of continuity and that they engage in in a sustained way.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a kind of important and interesting difference,
Speaker 1: and and maybe we can think more about that as
Speaker 1: we go on. But I mean, one of the things
Speaker 1: we should take away from this is that everybody day dreams.
Speaker 1: Normal people do it quite a bit. There's nothing pathological
Speaker 1: at all about daydreaming. So there's really nothing abnormal about
Speaker 1: some amount of it, provided that it is really daydreaming
Speaker 1: and not some form of hallucination or something like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, normal daydreaming is a fantasy that subject can
Speaker 1: clearly distinguish from reality. If you can't tell the difference
Speaker 1: between your fantasy and reality, then something else is going on,
Speaker 1: and you definitely have grounds for seeking a mental health
Speaker 1: professionals help. Right, the situation with m is not that
Speaker 1: she finds these things the daydream is reality. She just
Speaker 1: prefers it to reality. But if it is really just
Speaker 1: daydreaming clearly delineated from reality, it's also important that it
Speaker 1: doesn't occur in a way that's injurious to your way
Speaker 1: of life or to the lives of others around you.
Speaker 1: And we'll come back to that in a bit. So
Speaker 1: One of the things that's interesting about the recent attention
Speaker 1: on maladaptive daydreaming is just the fact that we went
Speaker 1: so long with so little psychological recognition of the possibility
Speaker 1: that excessive daydreaming could be a disorder that caused suffering
Speaker 1: in people's lives. Probably the first major work on maladaptive
Speaker 1: daydreaming was in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy in two
Speaker 1: thousand two, mentioned earlier by by Elie Summer, called maladaptive
Speaker 1: daydreaming a qualitative inquiry, and Summer rites first about Freud's thoughts,
Speaker 1: which we talked about earlier, that daydreaming is this attempted
Speaker 1: solution to a deprivation state that you know, it's a
Speaker 1: form of wish fulfillment that's moderated by all these constraints
Speaker 1: that society puts on you. But then, of course the
Speaker 1: idea developed. You've got Hartman and fifty eight saying that
Speaker 1: maybe fantasies serve some kind of actual adaptive function in
Speaker 1: the organism. You've got Eric Klinger, who we mentioned a
Speaker 1: minute ago, talking about how often people spend fantasizing, or
Speaker 1: how much time a day people spend fantasizing. Clinger said
Speaker 1: he found in his research that most fantasies, including both
Speaker 1: sleeping dreams and daydreams, primarily involve current concerns, you know,
Speaker 1: stuff that you're thinking about right now. So like you're
Speaker 1: probably more likely, you know, not dreaming about space adventures,
Speaker 1: but about what's in your email, yeah, or perhaps say
Speaker 1: your your evening plans, daydreaming about that or particular video
Speaker 1: game or film you're looking forward to right yeah. Or
Speaker 1: interpersonal conflicts that's a big one. How common is that
Speaker 1: dream of I'm having an argument with Jeffrey finally, and
Speaker 1: here's what I would really tell him. See now, this
Speaker 1: is an area where I feel like it's still daydreaming,
Speaker 1: but one might easily categorize it more as simply worrying
Speaker 1: and rehearsing for strife. You know, That's what a lot
Speaker 1: of what daydreaming is, and like imagining scenarios is a
Speaker 1: way of thinking about what you should do. But people
Speaker 1: when when they talk when they talk about daydreams sort
Speaker 1: of that they're very positive spin on it, you know,
Speaker 1: where they say, oh that that Dan, he's such a
Speaker 1: he's such a daydreamer. Nobody's thinking, oh that Dan, he's
Speaker 1: just always trying to think up what he would say
Speaker 1: if he had the courage to, you know, confront his
Speaker 1: boss or something. Right, Yeah, that's that's the good dan.
Speaker 1: The dan we like is the one who's daydreaming about
Speaker 1: swash buckling on Mars and you know, flying flying around
Speaker 1: the ridges of Phobos. The dan you do not like
Speaker 1: is the one who's thinking, like, here's what I should
Speaker 1: have said to Jeffrey. I should have told him that.
Speaker 1: But I know that is a common thing. I know
Speaker 1: people all the time or thinking about either what they
Speaker 1: would say if they had the guts to, or what
Speaker 1: they should have said in that argument they had yesterday,
Speaker 1: earlier today, and that at least it can be in
Speaker 1: a in the short term now adaptive for a lot
Speaker 1: of us, you know. I mean, you have like something
Speaker 1: kisses you off. The next day, it can be difficult
Speaker 1: to focus on the things you need to focus on,
Speaker 1: or to be present when you need to be present,
Speaker 1: because you're just running the same dialogue through your head. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I actually have a kind of counterintuitive view
Speaker 1: about the virtues of venting. People often talk about how
Speaker 1: they had a bad day at work and they need
Speaker 1: to vent, you know, and that's like I need to
Speaker 1: just let off all the steam and talk about it.
Speaker 1: I noticed that in myself and in other people, venting
Speaker 1: very frequently does not alleviate frustrations but makes them worse
Speaker 1: because you just get to talking about it, and then
Speaker 1: you keep talking about it, and it makes you more
Speaker 1: obsessed with the issue then you would have been otherwise.
Speaker 1: What it makes me think of the scene in Poltergeist too,
Speaker 1: where um, the dad coughs up the awful Giger creature
Speaker 1: and then it crawls off, Like that's what I feel like.
Speaker 1: Sometimes venting feels like it's like, oh, it's out of me,
Speaker 1: but now it's out of me, and it's disgusting and horrifying.
Speaker 1: Way to go. It's under the bed. Well, I think
Speaker 1: if you're going to vent, I think you should try
Speaker 1: to keep it short. You know, you should say what
Speaker 1: you got to say, but don't dwell on it. If
Speaker 1: you're dwell on it, it's it's just worse for you.
Speaker 1: So pinch off that Giger and you know venting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all right, let her go. But then okay, so
Speaker 1: back back to Summer. So Summer's chronicling the history of
Speaker 1: this idea before before we get to maladaptive daydreaming, itself,
Speaker 1: and in and eighty three he points out how Wilson
Speaker 1: and Barber discovered there's this group of people that they
Speaker 1: class as what are called fantasy prone personalities who were
Speaker 1: avid day dreamers, and these people tended to quote live
Speaker 1: much of their time in a world of their own making,
Speaker 1: in a world of imagery, imagination, and fantasy. So these
Speaker 1: people sort of have the ability to like pick a
Speaker 1: theme and not just think about it a little bit,
Speaker 1: but watch a scenario unfold in their imagination almost with
Speaker 1: the same kind of continuous quality as a person would
Speaker 1: watch a movie. They estimated that this group of fantasy
Speaker 1: prone people with sort of high fantasizing capabilities is about
Speaker 1: four percent of the general population, or up to four percent.
Speaker 1: Other studies on fantasy proneness found somewhat similar numbers, maybe
Speaker 1: between four percent and six percent of people, but also
Speaker 1: found some interesting correlations. Fantasy prone adults had often been
Speaker 1: encouraged to fantasize by a significant adult in their lives
Speaker 1: when they were younger, and also uh fantasy proneness is
Speaker 1: correlated with aversive childhood environments, with some studies finding that
Speaker 1: though it's about four to six percent maybe in the
Speaker 1: general population, it was at a rate of maybe nine
Speaker 1: to fourteen percent in people with the history of childhood abuse.
Speaker 1: And this sort of goes along, you know, in a
Speaker 1: in a limit, it did way with the Freudian idea,
Speaker 1: right that if you had some kind of inversive environment
Speaker 1: when you were a child, you had some kind of
Speaker 1: thing that you wanted to get through, you didn't want
Speaker 1: to be present in the unpleasant reality you were living,
Speaker 1: you would learn to come up with fantasy environments to cope.
Speaker 1: And they also found that fantasizers were more prone to
Speaker 1: depression and other issues. And we should we should be
Speaker 1: clear that fantasy proneness is not necessarily the same thing
Speaker 1: as maladaptive daydreaming, because there could be people who are
Speaker 1: prone to fantasies, but it doesn't necessarily interfere with their lives.
Speaker 1: And of course, when we're talking about ed adversary and trauma,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's not necessarily just like a situation
Speaker 1: of like physical abuse, right, but just say, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know problems at school or we have we always
Speaker 1: have to remember how how difficult say a move can be. Uh,
Speaker 1: family picks up and moves from one suited the other,
Speaker 1: you know, changing schools, etcetera. Yeah, exactly, or social problems,
Speaker 1: social isolation, um, any kind of family problems. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think things like that can drive a child inward
Speaker 1: and and send them to their inner resources. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know, as you've probably described, I mean you've had
Speaker 1: experiences like this, right, oh yeah, yeah, like you know,
Speaker 1: moving from one school to another, of being an example,
Speaker 1: or being in a school where you basically all of
Speaker 1: middle school. I think this can Middle school was definitely
Speaker 1: a time that drove me inward in a way that
Speaker 1: I probably never quite returned from. Middle schoolers really are
Speaker 1: the worst that is, like the worst age of humanity. Now,
Speaker 1: another strain of research that emerged in the twentieth century
Speaker 1: was that while healthy people use daydreaming to kind of
Speaker 1: work through problems or to enhance good feelings, distressed people
Speaker 1: can often enter into a kind of negative feedback loop
Speaker 1: with daydreams in a lot of the same ways that
Speaker 1: you could see other addictions coming into playing people's lives,
Speaker 1: where the excessive day dreaming causes them to feel weak
Speaker 1: or inadequate or generally bad about their lives for various reasons.
Speaker 1: They might be you know, missing out on things that
Speaker 1: it's causing them problems, and then the problems in their
Speaker 1: lives are driving them to want a day dream more
Speaker 1: so they can escape from their lives. It reminds me
Speaker 1: the line and the Warren Zevon song Splendid Isolation. We're saying, Mickey,
Speaker 1: take my hand and lead me through the world of self.
Speaker 1: WHOA what albums that on? Was that the eighties? Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm not sure when I got into the Zevon I
Speaker 1: was the greatest hits album? Uh oh, I see it.
Speaker 1: So I'm not exactly sure where one finds that in
Speaker 1: its original form. You're one of those Yvon posers. You're
Speaker 1: one of those those are sadly sadly uh so. So
Speaker 1: clearly there are different kinds of daydreaming right there, people
Speaker 1: with different levels of proneness. For some people it helps,
Speaker 1: for some people it hurts. And so Summer was trying
Speaker 1: to get a flavor of what this was like when
Speaker 1: people claim to experience maladaptive daydreaming symptoms, and so he
Speaker 1: used a qualitative methodology to assess people who presented with
Speaker 1: what seemed to be negative patterns of daydreaming, which again
Speaker 1: he coined this term maladaptive daydreaming. And so here here's
Speaker 1: what he found common themes of daydreaming tended to be violence,
Speaker 1: idealized self power and control, captivity, rescue and escape, and
Speaker 1: sexual arousal. And I think that's kind of interesting because
Speaker 1: it's strange how much it sounds like a list of
Speaker 1: the most common themes and adventure stories. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: basically the that list could be the narrative flow of
Speaker 1: a swashbuckling tale, uh huh. And then common functions he
Speaker 1: identified apparently were disengagement from stress and pain by mood
Speaker 1: enhancement and wish fulfillment fantasies. And then the other main
Speaker 1: one was for companionship, intimacy and soothing. So he they
Speaker 1: are all kinds of examples that he cites in his
Speaker 1: paper from the interviews, I just picked a couple of
Speaker 1: the more vivid ones to mention. Not all of them
Speaker 1: are this action movie like, but I want to read
Speaker 1: one of the quotes. Quote. I used to imagine America
Speaker 1: and the West at war against the Communist lock. There
Speaker 1: were bombardments, shelling, marine landings, and hand to hand battles
Speaker 1: in which the Communists would have many casualties. I imagine
Speaker 1: that my hometown is in ruins and under occupation, and
Speaker 1: I am fighting a guerrilla war with the underground. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I imagine myself fighting the guerrillas as part of the
Speaker 1: occupying forces. I often imagine myself as a soldier in
Speaker 1: battle against terrorists. I kill scores of them. The shooting
Speaker 1: fantasies relieve my tension. It sounds like red Dawn, yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: and it also reminds me of these the zombie apocalypse
Speaker 1: fantasies we discussed earlier right, which can clearly serve as
Speaker 1: a form of mental empowerment and escape. Right and then also,
Speaker 1: like both of these examples, a simpler worldview and which
Speaker 1: clearly defined lines of good and bad, of of of enemy,
Speaker 1: and ally. Here's another one quote. I am seated on
Speaker 1: the field of a football stadium, surrounded with barbed wire.
Speaker 1: I am chosen by the prisoners to negotiate with the
Speaker 1: captors because she is known to be an emotionally disassociate
Speaker 1: ated person, hence not susceptible to psychological pressure. I am
Speaker 1: allowed to walk toward a desk with two chairs and
Speaker 1: sitting in the bigger one. My opponent is putting forth
Speaker 1: his demands and threatens me with a gun. I pour
Speaker 1: myself a hot drink and sit from it with stable hands,
Speaker 1: smile at him and tell him that I am suicidal,
Speaker 1: so he cannot threaten me with anything because I've got
Speaker 1: nothing to lose. He realizes he lost the bargaining, and
Speaker 1: I give the sign for the insurrection to begin. From
Speaker 1: now on, it's like a Hollywood action movie with explosion,
Speaker 1: smoke and lots of blood. Although I am wounded, I
Speaker 1: managed to free most of the prisoners and I leave
Speaker 1: them to safety. I love this because I get a
Speaker 1: real Garth Marenghee dark place five from it. Blood, blood
Speaker 1: and bits of the sick. It's such a great, great show. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the really interesting things that I've found when
Speaker 1: reading about maladaptive daydreaming, and that's reported in this study,
Speaker 1: but then also in some others, is that there are
Speaker 1: some common pros sesses associated with this, with obsessive or
Speaker 1: maladaptive daydreaming UH processes having to do with physical place
Speaker 1: and physical action, often with an object in the hand. Robert,
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier when you were a child that you
Speaker 1: would day dream with a rubber band in your hand,
Speaker 1: manipulating it with your hands always. I had to have
Speaker 1: a rubber band, and you it had to be green
Speaker 1: or red. It couldn't be just the brown ones because
Speaker 1: they weren't they weren't exciting enough. And also this this
Speaker 1: is I guess maybe this sounds kind of strange, but
Speaker 1: the the red and green rubber bands were explosions. And
Speaker 1: I would also make explosion noises as explosions were needed
Speaker 1: in these imagined scenarios, because apparently there were a lot
Speaker 1: of explosions. Well, I mean, given our samples, sometimes explosions
Speaker 1: if you got to happen. I want to read a
Speaker 1: quote from one of the subjects in Summer's study quote.
Speaker 1: When I daydream, I often hold an object in my hand,
Speaker 1: say an a racer or a marble. I taw sit
Speaker 1: in the air. This repetitive monotone movement helps ME concentrate
Speaker 1: on the fantasy. Daydreaming is easier when I do this
Speaker 1: because I don't get distracted by other things in the room.
Speaker 1: At other times, I would go down to the basement
Speaker 1: and pace for hours while daydreaming. Also from the same patient,
Speaker 1: sometimes I would go into an orchard behind my house.
Speaker 1: Nobody comes there. I like the solitude because I could
Speaker 1: act the fantasies out loud. I can shout and scream
Speaker 1: there without shame. And these are commonly reported elements having
Speaker 1: a place to go to, being in physical motion while
Speaker 1: doing the daydreaming, like pacing or driving or something like that,
Speaker 1: and having an object to manipulate in the hand. Why
Speaker 1: that that is so interesting to me? Why those things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really makes me think back on my my own
Speaker 1: imaginative behavior as a kid, for sure. All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's take a break and when we come back we
Speaker 1: will continue and conclude our exploration of maladaptive daydreaming. Thank
Speaker 1: thank thank you. All Right, we're back now. We mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: there's a good piece in The Atlantic about maladaptive daydreaming
Speaker 1: from by Jane Biggleson and Tina Kelly called win day
Speaker 1: Dreaming Replaces Real Life that has some really good stories
Speaker 1: in it about what this experience is like. So I
Speaker 1: just wanted to read maybe a couple of quotes from
Speaker 1: this article of the author describing her own experience. She writes,
Speaker 1: when I was eight years old, I had a game
Speaker 1: I like to play in my front yard in suburban
Speaker 1: New Jersey. My siblings were older and mostly out of
Speaker 1: the house. My parents worked long hours, and when there
Speaker 1: was nothing much to do, I'd walk in circles while
Speaker 1: shaking a piece of string, daydreaming about Little House on
Speaker 1: the Prairie or the Brady Bunch. One afternoon, I created
Speaker 1: an episode where instead of going to Hawaii, where dangerous
Speaker 1: spiders lurk, the Bradys went to the Bahamas, where I
Speaker 1: had just been a week with my family. Greg Brady
Speaker 1: met my teenage sister there and they started dating. The
Speaker 1: show playing in my head was so detailed and entertaining
Speaker 1: that it lasted forty five minute. Another day, I imagine
Speaker 1: myself as the actress who played the seventh Brady sibling.
Speaker 1: I met all the other young actors on set, and
Speaker 1: they commented on my cute outfit and amazing acting skills. Again,
Speaker 1: the string in her hand, the object to manipulate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I totally get it. I it's hard again, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's difficult for me to put it into words, but
Speaker 1: I know exactly what she's doing there. And the author
Speaker 1: goes on to chronicle how with her experiences of of
Speaker 1: of obsessive daydreaming going on throughout her life, she eventually
Speaker 1: came to investigate this issue full like she got involved
Speaker 1: in the subject of maladaptive daydreaming at the research level,
Speaker 1: and she was a test subject in some research and
Speaker 1: one of the things she found was that, So she
Speaker 1: went in for some brain imaging for some fm R
Speaker 1: I to look at what's going on in her brain
Speaker 1: while she's actively daydreaming, and one of the things they
Speaker 1: found was quote, great activity in the ventral stree atom,
Speaker 1: the part of the brain that lights up when an
Speaker 1: alcoholic has shown images of a martini. It's so it's
Speaker 1: literally setting off some kind of addiction response type feeling
Speaker 1: cheaper and healthier. Though right, probably healthier, but not necessarily
Speaker 1: better for your life. I mean, depending on what the
Speaker 1: circumstances are. I mean again, we we certainly don't want
Speaker 1: to demonize healthy forms of daydreaming, but for many of
Speaker 1: these people, they end up seeking communities online for people
Speaker 1: who have the same issues as them, or seeking clinical
Speaker 1: help because these people realize, like, this is taking up
Speaker 1: so much of my life, it is making me unable
Speaker 1: to live my life, it's interfering with my work, with
Speaker 1: my relationships, it's it's gone beyond its useful role. One
Speaker 1: of the other things that's interesting that gets pointed out
Speaker 1: in this article is the possible overlap between maladaptive daydreaming
Speaker 1: and a disorder that's been known as stereotypic movement disorder,
Speaker 1: which involves repetitive motions of the body, kind of like
Speaker 1: what we've been talking about with like pacing or repeatedly
Speaker 1: UM moving you know, an object in the hand like
Speaker 1: often SMD seems to have something to do with flapping
Speaker 1: of the hands or movement of the arms or something
Speaker 1: like that. And one of the things the authors talk
Speaker 1: about is that UM. There was a study that studied
Speaker 1: children who have stereotypic movement disorder forty two children, and
Speaker 1: this was in two thousand and ten. And when the
Speaker 1: researchers in the study asked the kids what they were
Speaker 1: doing when they were performing their repetitive motions, eight three
Speaker 1: percent of the of the kids said they were repeating
Speaker 1: stories in their heads. So it sounds like there may
Speaker 1: be some overlap with this existing known condition. And again
Speaker 1: I wonder what is the neural link between the motions
Speaker 1: of the body and the internal storytelling impulse. Well, it
Speaker 1: makes me think back to the more recent study we
Speaker 1: talked about discussing default mode network and the being on autopilot,
Speaker 1: Like maybe there has to be some sort of autopilot
Speaker 1: thing you're doing, and it could be swimming or or
Speaker 1: pacing about, but also just manipulating an object. Maybe you're
Speaker 1: not actually performing a task but in in object manipulation
Speaker 1: or you know, some sort of basic tool use uh
Speaker 1: and it maybe it's a necessary part of that network. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that could be. You know, one of the researchers
Speaker 1: in this article who gets quoted talks about how there's
Speaker 1: a possibility that day dreaming is somehow kind of like
Speaker 1: a fever, Like it is a natural defense mechanism. It's
Speaker 1: a cognitive defense mechanism for dealing with cognitive threats. Um.
Speaker 1: But it can, of course, like a fever, be harmful
Speaker 1: if it gets out of control. And for some people
Speaker 1: this defense mechanism, while in some cases useful, it does
Speaker 1: get out of control for them. What that makes sense too?
Speaker 1: And when you think about the ways that that writer's
Speaker 1: end up exploring, or not just writer has been any
Speaker 1: kind of a you know creative individual is doing some
Speaker 1: sort of art or something. To consider their art, you know,
Speaker 1: you end up processing a lot of your own anxieties
Speaker 1: and fears and hopes and dreams the who that art?
Speaker 1: So it maybe and maybe that is just and something
Speaker 1: that's overlaid here and not part of the actual uh
Speaker 1: you know, origin of the the impulse. But maybe there's
Speaker 1: a connection. Yeah, well, I mean I often think with
Speaker 1: with like works of fiction. It's funny when people ask
Speaker 1: authors like to interpret their own work in the light
Speaker 1: of their biography. You know, you hear that. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you wrote this character in this novel, who does this?
Speaker 1: What is that? You know? How does that relate to
Speaker 1: your life? This thing that happened to you? I feel
Speaker 1: like you've got it backwards. You should be telling the
Speaker 1: writer how what they wrote explains their life. The writer
Speaker 1: doesn't know. Yeah, yeah, like like often the writer has
Speaker 1: to sort of have the realization like, oh, well, I
Speaker 1: guess I guess this story was about, you know, my
Speaker 1: substance abuse problem or what have you. You You know. And
Speaker 1: speaking of substance abuse, of course, I mean one of
Speaker 1: the things that comes up again and again in these
Speaker 1: reports is that some of the people who experience maladaptive
Speaker 1: daydreaming compare it in way in some ways to an addiction.
Speaker 1: Going back to you know what some of the brain
Speaker 1: imaging seem to show we mentioned a minute ago, is
Speaker 1: that there isn't an addiction like response in the brain,
Speaker 1: and then some people subjectively describe it as being like
Speaker 1: in addiction. One of the people quoted in the Atlantic
Speaker 1: article says, I felt the daydreaming was my main reality
Speaker 1: and I only peek out into the main world now
Speaker 1: and then it's like I'm an alcoholic with an unlimited
Speaker 1: supply of booze. I can't turn it off. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: for the most part, you don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: becoming physically ill from too much daydreaming, or falling over
Speaker 1: from too much daydreaming, etcetera. Like there, it seems like
Speaker 1: there are fewer obviously their limits, but there are few
Speaker 1: are hard limits involved there. Yeah, that's true. But as
Speaker 1: we've seen, of course, it can be a strong interference
Speaker 1: with the kind of life people want to live. And
Speaker 1: that's the reason there are all these you know, support
Speaker 1: groups and and a push to get this more recognized
Speaker 1: in in psychiatric and psychological treatment communities now, and there
Speaker 1: are some treatments that that seemed to be coming along.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're still in the early days of understanding
Speaker 1: maladaptive daydreaming as a psychological condition that that is treated
Speaker 1: in a clinical way, but some are in his two
Speaker 1: thousand two articles found that therapy helped some patients with
Speaker 1: aspects of their maladaptive daydreaming, including reducing violent themes in
Speaker 1: the daydreaming and reducing the amount of time spent on it.
Speaker 1: There are some drugs that in some cases have been
Speaker 1: found work. Fluvoxamine, which is primarily used to treat obsessive
Speaker 1: compulsive disorder, has apparently been used with some success. Other
Speaker 1: patients have had some success with S S R. Eyes.
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting things I came across was
Speaker 1: also from that Atlantic article that it referred to one
Speaker 1: person with maladaptive daydreaming who said quote, I recently found
Speaker 1: that constantly writing wandering thoughts down or keeping track of them,
Speaker 1: keeps you from falling into intense daydreaming. So the act
Speaker 1: of right, I mean this brings it back to the
Speaker 1: Freud issue with like creative writing versus day dreaming. The
Speaker 1: act of writing down your creative thoughts somehow makes them
Speaker 1: stop flowing so hard, And I mean I know that
Speaker 1: from experience. Sometimes it's almost like weaponizing writer's block against
Speaker 1: your own imagination. You run the risk though then of
Speaker 1: you know, you write down the ones that you think
Speaker 1: I promise and then that to fill you with with
Speaker 1: joy on some level. But then you don't maybe you
Speaker 1: don't write down the ones that are like stupid and
Speaker 1: uh and and awful, you know, the ones that are
Speaker 1: that are that fall into that special category of you know,
Speaker 1: because yeah, I feel like, especially people who are write
Speaker 1: up like horror or anything horror esque, you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're liable to turn their fears into something useful, into
Speaker 1: something artistic and artistic expression of their fears. But what
Speaker 1: do you do when it's just something dumb, Like it's
Speaker 1: dumb and it's hurtful, uh, dumb and hurtful day dream
Speaker 1: that you've got to make us like a special activity,
Speaker 1: I guess, of extracting it, of putting it on paper
Speaker 1: and then just watting it up and forgetting about it. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I wonder, so there's the common experience of
Speaker 1: people sort of daydreaming by writing their lives into the
Speaker 1: existing plots and storylines of other TV shows and books
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. I wonder how often this type
Speaker 1: of daydreaming phases into just writing fan fiction. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're you're I can see that where that could
Speaker 1: that could occur because you're just so into this world,
Speaker 1: you know, and then you you can't help it, want
Speaker 1: to become a part of it. Yeah, I can't help.
Speaker 1: But wonder in general if if some people who have
Speaker 1: this condition would find relief through just creative writing, like
Speaker 1: if you force yourself to write kind of like this
Speaker 1: this last person was saying, if you force yourself to
Speaker 1: write your creative thoughts down, that might only not just
Speaker 1: limit them, but also give you something productive you can
Speaker 1: do with that time you spent. So you don't just say, well,
Speaker 1: I spent three hours daydreaming today, I don't know you
Speaker 1: know where that time went. You could say I spent
Speaker 1: three hours writing today. Well, not only do I think
Speaker 1: that's a great idea, but I totally support anything that
Speaker 1: will create employment opportunities for my fellow creative writing majors. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we have to accept that not all writing
Speaker 1: can be writing for money, and that's okay. But you know,
Speaker 1: if somebody is trying to tell you to write, they
Speaker 1: should be paying you money. So let's bring it all
Speaker 1: back to good old Kirk Allen. Okay. I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 1: we just don't have a lot of hard facts about
Speaker 1: about who he was or what he actually went through.
Speaker 1: But I wonder how we can apply everything we've discussed
Speaker 1: in these two episodes to his case. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I wonder if he would have directly fit this emerging
Speaker 1: diagnosis of the maladaptive daydreamer. Um, and I don't know.
Speaker 1: I wonder what we what we will continue to learn
Speaker 1: about maladaptive daydreaming in the in the coming years, and
Speaker 1: whether that will shed any new light on the Kirk
Speaker 1: Allen story. Yeah. And of course we have a lot
Speaker 1: of listeners out there who to write in and share
Speaker 1: their experiences with us. And I know that all of
Speaker 1: you have experiences with daydreaming, and I imagine there are
Speaker 1: going to be some of you who have experience with
Speaker 1: maladaptive daydreaming or something that in self analysis feels close
Speaker 1: to what we've described here. So we would love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. And of course we can keep things
Speaker 1: anonymous if if you would hope, if you want to
Speaker 1: do it that way, sure, um, you know so, certainly
Speaker 1: just stress that point when you when you reach out
Speaker 1: to us. But yeah, we want to hear from everyone
Speaker 1: about your day dreams. If you have had maladaptive daydreaming,
Speaker 1: what have you found, if anything that has helped you
Speaker 1: reduce that down to a tolerable level or helped you
Speaker 1: get along with your normal life. Yeah, let us know.
Speaker 1: And if you want to let us know, the first
Speaker 1: step and reaching out to us is heading over to
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is fine,
Speaker 1: where you will find all the podcast episodes going way
Speaker 1: back to the very beginning, including those Alien abduction episodes,
Speaker 1: those X file episodes, They're all on there. You'll also
Speaker 1: find links out to our social media accounts. You'll find
Speaker 1: a tab at the top of the page for our
Speaker 1: store where you can get some sweet swag that has
Speaker 1: our new updated logo on it, or podcast episode specific designs.
Speaker 1: A little bicameral mind here, a little uh black hole
Speaker 1: cinema right here. Uh anything you can want get on
Speaker 1: a sticker shirt, and the proceeds, of course support the show.
Speaker 1: And if you want to support the show in a
Speaker 1: cheaper fashion, just simply rate and review it wherever you
Speaker 1: have the ability to do so. That helps us a lot.
Speaker 1: Big thanks as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex
Speaker 1: Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us directly to let us know feedback
Speaker 1: about this episode or any other, or just to say hi,
Speaker 1: let us know where you listen from a suggested topic
Speaker 1: for a future episode. You can email us at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other type thicks. Does it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. I think the buses