One day, I was at work at a school Sixth Form. A teenage boy sat at my desk, holding his head forward and using tissues to staunch a nose bleed. A girl had brought him into my office, and I remember thanking her for helping him. She was one of the popular gang and he was a social outsider, so it was an unusual incident on a Monday morning. I found out later that it was the girl that had punched him in the nose and she’d brought him in from a sense of guilt, but I didn’t know this at the time. My mobile phone rang - my teenager was in tears and I couldn’t make out what was wrong.
“I’ve found out what it is. It’s not just me. Other people have it. Hundreds! I’m not crazy, oh my god, it’s not just me!”
The boy, I’ll call him Liam, was trying to exit my office, waving me back to my desk.
“One sec, sweetheart... Take the tissues, come back after tutor group to put it in the incident book! …Sorry, are you okay, where are you?”
My non-binary child told me a story that I didn’t expect to hear; of dreams experienced whilst awake, lasting days at a time, of assassins and castles, where they could fly and jump and kick, and daily life had to take a back seat because they were immersed in a vivid story playing out in real time. Dreams that were hyperreal; glowing colours, sights and sounds beyond anything they’d experienced, and how they couldn’t tell us anything about it, because it would sound insane.
“Wait, are you talking about a videogame? What is making you so upset?”
The bell was ringing, and there wasn’t time to fully understand this complicated story. But that night, we sat down together and they showed me the online forum called Wild Minds Network*.
They’d stumbled across it, and had been up most of last night reading comment after comment. A divorced dad in Jamaica, a teen from Arkansas, a young girl in Yorkshire, a nurse with a qualification in psychiatry; all described similar obsessions, starting in childhood, and hidden in shame. They explained how they needed space to move around and often used music to lull themselves into an almost hypnotic state, at which point they conjured stories with their eyes closed. But these went beyond daydreams.
In these stories, sometimes beginning with scenes from films or books or games, they met people, made friends or had lovers, became famous or lived out fantasies, but the dream didn’t stop there. It continued, day after day, becoming an epic tale, where they explored relationships, tried out lifestyles and imagined whole interactive worlds. It was fascinating and more exciting than their daily existence. They might stay up all night, pacing in these dreamlike states, so as to carry on without interruption. They might wait until the family had gone out or they would feign being ill in bed so that they could carry on world-building. It wasn’t written down, it was held in their memory, and it had layers of complexity and emotional involvement. Many explained that they neglected family or friends to continue with their solo adventure.
They called it maladaptive daydreaming.
My non-binary child told me of an Israeli professor of clinical psychology who had coined the phrase, and that his name was Dr Eli Somer. They told me that they understood that people used it to escape their problems, but that it wasn’t ONLY that, it was also a space for joy. They told me that they hated being interrupted when they were pacing in their room, because they were fully immersed in this world, and snapping out of it was jarring. It was an immense relief to be able to talk about it with me, but they were in tears, convinced that it meant they would likely be alone for the rest of their life. Who would live with someone who was half in the real world, but mostly only happy out of it?
They shared very few details of the landscape and people in their maladaptive world. Mostly from embarrassment, but also because they found it hard to describe a whole world. Mixed in with their feelings about it sounding childish or ridiculous, they also described how they sometimes started from a TV plotline, and then explored some aspect of it, re-enacting scenes, replaying them, trying multiple outcomes, switching characters, finding resolutions.
I realised that they had been doing this for years, even as a young child. As parents, we hadn’t comprehended what was going on, but we’d heard them ‘dancing’ in their room, and we knew they had a sleep disorder and a diagnosis of autism, which I’d pursued because they found school environments a sensory challenge and I’d thought the teachers would help them uncover coping strategies. They initially disagreed with the educational psychologist’s summary, but came to accept that autism is just one way of describing brains that are different from the norm.
It isn’t fair to my child to share more of their story. Especially as they are now an adult. But I wanted to understand how it must have felt to hide this secret for sixteen years.
So I wrote ‘Outlandish’ - the story of a boy, living on a remote island, collecting sounds from the natural world. Felix has similarities with that long ago boy with a nose bleed and social anxiety. But he is also a maladaptive daydreamer, making sense of life in Bristol with his single mum, as Covid hits and the real world turns upside down.
What purpose does dreaming serve?
A playground for our overheated brain? A chance to explore the subconscious mind, full of oddities and half-recollections from the days before? Scientists will tell us dreaming is about problem-solving, emotional regulation and memory consolidation, and I can think of dreams I’ve had, including recurring ones, that hint at fears or buried anxieties I was wrestling with at the time.
I’ve read about Jungian archetypes, their symbols repeated in dreams, which suggest a collective unconscious world-mind that we can access in a dreaming state. There are examples of people who dream of snakes but have never seen one in real life. Are they accessing human memories encoded deep in our DNA?
Or what if dreaming goes beyond even that?
What if dreams help us build ourselves as human beings? Our waking moments give us experiences and reactions that we don’t have time to process until we lay down to sleep. After two hours, we slide into deep unconsciousness to fully relax our tired muscles, while our brain ramps up a gear and begins sifting and performing tricks and storing memories in layers, building sense from nonsense, and while it is doing this, it is creating an image of ourselves, building an identity, storing moments that are rational and irrational that help us to become who we are.
If this is the case, it explains why lack of sleep is so disturbing. We don’t feel like ourselves. Our sense of reality is off kilter because our brain hasn’t been able to reinforce our stored identity, remind us of the sum of our experiences and integrate us back into a whole persona by morning.
So, I've written other novels, but this one feels like a mission. If you know a literary agent, please share this with them. Over four million people worldwide are estimated to have this condition, hidden from their closest friends and family, feeling shame and embarrassment. And yet we live in a society obsessed with games, stories, playgrounds, distractions - so can't we all relate?
pennylapenna@gmail.com
