Kirk Allen and Maladaptive Daydreaming

We're talking about daydreams. We're talking about how we try to objectively understand the universe even as more subjective narratives are presented to us, narratives like UFOs or demons, etcetera, or traveling into the future and being a space lord exactly. Now, if you haven't heard the last episode, you should probably go and check that one out first, where we tell

the whole story of Kirk Allen. We're gonna be following up on some of the threads from it and this one and pursuing some research on the idea of malad active day dreaming, because the idea with Kirk Allen is that, essentially, the short version is you had a guy with a with a very important job, like a nuclear physicist for a government institution, that was daydreaming so much that it became a problem that his employers said, we want you

to go talk to a professional about this. Now, the story goes, at least as it's presented by his therapist, who was writing later and fictionalizing elements of the story, both to protect the identity of the patient and as far as we know, maybe maybe not also embellishing the

story to make it a better story. We don't know, But the story goes that kirk Allen the pseudonym for this patient, that he was referred to Robert Linden, or the therapist, and that Lindener became so involved in kirk Allen's beliefs that he could travel into the future and in his mind and be a space lord and go from planet to planet and explore all these technologies and galactic civilizations, that he got so involved in that that

he started to believe it himself. And then it took kirk Allen admitting that he made the whole thing up and didn't actually believe any of it, to snap the therapist out of believing in the delusion. And it makes for a great story, like it illustrates like the power the contagious nature of of of of a compelling fiction exactly. But today we wanted to explore this other element of it.

So if we go with the story and we assume that Kirk Allen never did believe any of what he was saying, He never actually believed he was a space lord. He just spent a lot of time fantasizing about it, though he can tell the difference between his fantasy and reality.

What would that situation be. Imagine You've got this guy, He's doing important nuclear physics or whatever other kind of government research, and they can't keep him on task because he's always thinking about how he's going to finish his paper on the hyperdrive thruster that will get him to tow St nine or whatever. Yeah. I mean, the cool thing about all this, and I think ultimately the fascinating part about it, is that we I think we can all relate on some level to the you know, the

the attractive power of daydreaming. I mean we we we all do it, and certainly we all did it when we were children. Uh. I mean, I I've always had a pretty active imagination as a kid. I was I was content to pace around the backyard. I would generally have a red or a green rubber band in my hand, and I would just daydream a litany of imagined worlds, inspired you know by typical things that are going to inspire a kid, you know, the TV shows, movies, cartoons

and action figures, that sort of thing. And uh, and I think everybody in my family probably thought I was a little bit weird because of it, but they, you know, they tolerated it, even only so they could continue to make fun of me as an adult. And uh, you know, then to their to everyone's credit, they encouraged my creative activities later on in life that employed much of the same energy, just without the rubber band and all the pacing. Um, I guess maybe I still do some of the pacing.

But you do the pacing if you're not noticed. Yeah, well, I you know, it's it's good for one to get up, um all the time during work, not trying to call you out. I paced two. Well like for well, one thing I do now is I I do a lot of swimming, and while I'm swimming, I am inevitably doing some form of imaginative thoughts, some sort of daydreaming I'm thinking about, say, uh, you know, the fiction podcast that I'm putting together here for how stuff works and sort

of plotting that out. Uh, it's and it's all sort of an experiment in like constructive daydreaming. Right, if I'm lucky enough to visit a beach, that's the kind of thing that occupies my mind on long walks, like I I love those times in my life when I'm able to not worry about the future, you know, or or or you know, hang up over the past, and instead just daydream about something uh, completely different. Well, as I've said recently on the show, I think narrative is a

sacred retreat. But it's not just to sacred retreat when you're reading the narratives of others. It's certainly a sacred retreat when you're composing your own. Yeah. Now I have to say that I'm I'm fortunate to have outlets for my creativity and uh, and I'm also very fortunate that daydreaming and imagination doesn't negatively impact my life and at

least currently uh and not everyone though, can make these claims. Yeah, that that's a lot of what we're gonna be focusing on today is like when when when it crosses that line when daydreaming goes over the line and becomes something not not so positive but more destructive to people's lives, you know. Thinking about my own childhood, I can specifically remember the process of trying to prolong or reinter dreams that I had exited by waking up. Did you ever

have this experience? I remember, in particular this one dream I had where I found a tunnel in my closet and crawling through the tunnel, it went to a beach where there was a girl there who was a friend of mine, and she could turn into a fish, I think, or a dolphin or a cat. But I could also in this dream swing around on tree branches by using a whip like Indiana Jones, And that was just the coolest thing ever, because I loved Indiana Jones, and I

especially loved the swinging action. That sounds amazing. That that reminds me of how I once had a Rocketeer dream. Only once did I have this dream where I was flying with the Rocketeers jet pack and it was just so beautiful. It was just so breathtaking, and I've never

had that dream again. Yeah, I remember this just being an overwhelmingly fun dream I had a morphin friend, and I could swing around in tree branches like like Indiana Jones, and for some reason it was just so fun that when I woke up, I was like, oh, I've got to get back there, and I tried to re enter it,

but I couldn't do it. I tried to go back to sleep again and dream the same dream, but I couldn't make myself And I remember trying really hard to imagine having the same dream again while I was awake, but I couldn't really do that either, at least not with the same intensity. And I know this wasn't the only time I tried to recreate a dream state while I was awake. This is just one really vivid one

that I remember. And I think this impulse to try so hard to imagine myself back into a dream sort of is part of what led me to become interested in fiction writing. Because while dreams always fade very quickly in memory, even very vivid ones tend too if you don't talk about them or write them down after you wake up. Imaginary scenarios coded down in writing those are permanent, and you can re enter them with full fidelity at any time. You know your story reminds me a lot

of HP Lovecrafts, The dream Quest of Unknown Cats. I don't know that it's it's a wonderful and imaginative tale, very unlike most of his. It's one of his dream stories, so it's it's it's more fantasy than horror, though it has you know, the horror elements for sure. But the basic idea is that a dream or a man dreams a dream so beautiful that the gods, the elder beings deny it to him, and hasked to go on a quest to try and reclaim that dream. Whoa is it

beautiful or or sad and melancholy? That that's so much of what life is is not not necessarily chasing a new experience that you haven't had, but trying to recapture a perfect experience, you remember, Yeah, it's true. It kind of gets to the heart of the power of nostalgia, right. Yeah. You know, in our previous episode, we we talked a good a good deal about Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World because that was the context in which we read

this original story about Kirk Allen. Yeah, and uh and and Sagan has a wonderful quote here just about fantasy and reality that I wanted to read, He says, quote. Out of all these contending propensities and child rearing practices, some people emerge with an intact ability to fantasize and a history extending well into adulthood of confabulation. Others grow up believing that everyone who doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy is crazy. Most of us are somewhere

in between. That's a good point. I mean, I so obviously somebody who is U two wrapped up in their in their fantasies, in their own head, that person is obviously going to be having trouble. And when you you encounter somebody like that, you can often recognize it. But I think equally, you don't trust somebody at the far opposite end of the spectrum who just has no tolerance for imagination. You know, you sometimes meet people like this.

Oh yeah, I saw a guy at um It was a tiki bar in uh in, Hawaii, and he was ordering a drink, probably a mind hie or something, but he had specific directions for the servery. He said, he said, bring me one of these, but no umbrellas, no fancy mug just makes you basically make this drink as boring as possible, no fun for me, no umbrellas, Like I refuse to pretend that there's a tiny man living on the surface of my drink that needs shade from the

sun exactly. It's like, why are you even here if you're if you're not here to engage in in funny umbrella drinks, that's a tiki bar. Heretic right there. But let's come back to just the subject of day dreaming and creativity. Robert you know who had some interesting thoughts about daydreaming and creativity, Good old Sigmund Freud, who I bet he did dr joy So he talked about this in a nineteen o seven essay called Creative Writers in Daydreaming, And I just want to preempt please do not take

this discussion as an endorsement in general of Freudianism. While Freud is of course a very important figure to read in the history of ideas, a lot of his influence on psychology has given way too much more rigorous, more explicitly science based practices. I think these days Freud is more worth reading in the vein of thinking about him as a kind of like philosopher or something. But so Freud starts with one of those great questions that we might sometimes think of as too simple bowl or too

fundamental to actually ask out loud. The Robert. You might have heard this one before. Somebody knows you write fiction, or they read one of your stories and they ask you, Robert, where do you get your ideas? How do you think up what to get the characters to say and to do? Have you ever been asked this? Yeah, I've been asked versions of this before. I've been asked this too. I was actually asked it fairly recently, and it's always struck me as a bizarre question because I thought, I don't know.

I would think the answer is obvious. It's like I get ideas by using my imagination and imagining what the character would do. But the fact that some people end up asking this question of other people indicates that obviously, not everybody has the same propensity for imagining fictional characters and places and scenarios and all that. So to some people it comes more naturally than it does to others.

I mean, I'm always reminded of the subject of a fantasia, you know, the idea that not everyone can form mental images, which doesn't directly relate to what we're talking about here, but it's a reminder of just how different our brains can be. So I can you know, see why someone might not initially grasp how an imagined character uh comes to speak or act uh, and they might find it harder still to understand how these fictional characters that people dream up may well think or act in ways that

the imagineer does not expect. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, one of the things I noticed in writing is that the process of creativity, at least for me, is very highly uh shaped by the act of recording the creative process. So it's like writing a story is very different than just trying to think out a story in my head. Once once it turns into words, then you realize, oh, all this has got to change. Yeah. I I often feel like I have two processes that

I'm working with. One is that that day dreaming while I'm swimming laps or whatever. But then there's the process of actually writing things, and things may change drastically, uh, depending on the demands of that process. Just to point out quickly, also before we move on, you mentioned the idea that not everybody can form images in their head as one possible uh factor affecting whether people can compose fiction. But we've heard from people who are fiction writers who

have a fantasition. Know, yeah, I I don't. I bring it up more as just an example of how our brains are different. Not that it would would impact, it would change, not it would change the way one composes fiction, I think. But but yeah, certainly someone of the fantasia can and and they do write fiction. They do, uh come up with fabulous ideas. Um. But yeah, we we we often fall into that trap of thinking that everyone

has a brain more or less like mine. Maybe it's you know, maybe it's it's it's it's you know it. Maybe it's more powerful than mine, or maybe it's not as finely tuned as mine. But all our brains are basically the same, and an example like a fantasia just reminds you know, this is not the at all. Yeah,

you're exactly right. So Freud began by observing this idea that not all brains are the same, and that not all brains are the same in terms of ability to be creative, to come up with creative stories, and specifically for the purpose of this conversation. We are talking about creativity in terms of like making up stories, not the more generalized idea of creativity, right, which can well and does entail things that are not like you know, literature

major creativity. I mean, certainly there is creativity within science, there's creativity within programming, etcetera. There's creativity and getting a piece of meat out of a cage trap exactly. But no way, So we're talking about like coming up with ideas, like creative storytelling and stuff. So so, Freud says, you know, even non creative people do have some experience with the thinking of creative writers. Even if you're one of these people who asks how do you come up with your ideas? Well,

how do you know what the characters should do? These people, Freud says, do have experience with that because it's in the imagination based play of their childhood. Think back on your childhood, what was it like to play pretend? And he writes, quote, might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, and that he creates a world of his own, or rather rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him. It would be wrong to think he does not take

the world seriously. On the contrary, he takes his play very seriously, and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious, but what is real? Might we not say that every creative writer is a giant baby? I'm kidding, well, I I agree with that last part of what Freud says, because play play is a departure from constraints, not a departure from stakes. There's nothing in the world more serious and important than what happens in a child's game. I'm sure

you know from experience. If the floor is lava, the floor is lava. Yeah. Though, I have to say, play is definitely a topic that demands its own episode at some point. I mean, there's so much going on when a child plays, even when an adult engages in play. And then of course we have other mammals that engage in play as well, especially when they're young. Totally true. So Freud says that the creative writer just extends this type of play into adulthood and then uses the help

of writing to record the play. Otherwise, the process is very similar. The creative writer creates a world of fantasy and then takes it very seriously by investing huge amounts of genuine emotion into it, but keeps it separated sharply from the constraints of reality. So what's happening here? Why does the day dreamer or the fiction writer do this? You know? Why does the play in the imagination happen? And Freud notes something. He says, what's common to almost

every single work of fiction. Well, we gotta have a hero, right exactly the song says we need a hero, right. I'm holding out for a hero for Freudian reasons. There now this. Obviously, there's all kinds of fiction out there in the world today. There's experimental fiction and fiction that breaks every rule in the book, right, but most fiction

still does abide by this. You've gotta have a hero around which the interest of the story is centered and to which the author wishes to engender the audience's sympathies. And another thing he points out is that the hero is, by necessity of the plot invulnerable. The reader can always trust that the hero will not be killed in chapter two, or else there would be no story, or at least that's what it's like as an adult. I feel like any time I get my son to watch any time

we introduce him to a new film. Um, he does not realize that the main character is going to make it to the end of a children's film. Man, Like, I wish I could go back to that. That's amazing. I know it's it's at once uh amazing and frustrating, because on one hand it's like, wow, he is experiencing this film with such raw uh you know, vulnerability and the other and then on the other side, it's like, I just want you to be able to watch Muana

and uh and with the with the family. We just want to make it to the end of this movie. It's just a Disney princess movie. We should be able to handle it, don't you dare take that magic away from him? That No, that's a beautiful thing. Oh my god, I can't believe it. I remember what that was like back before I understood all of the like cliches of story structure, when every when, every narrative was a radical

surprise to me. Things aren't quite like that anymore, and I and I wish I could return to that mind state. But anyway, Sorry, going back to Freud, so Freud notices that the hero is always invulnerable by necessity of the plot, and also the hero enjoys unrealistic good fortune in like love and romance. So Freud writes, quote, through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability, we can immediately recognize his majesty, the ego, the hero alike of every day dream and every story.

It's probably telling about the kind of fiction I read. But I can't remember the last time I read something where the protagonist had great fortune in love in romance, I feel like, I feel like they're mostly having a pretty bad time. Well, I think if you take the long view, okay, when the stories resolve, there are a lot of stories where people go through a lot of tragedy and then in the end that everything comes out right.

All right, I'll get back to you on that. I'm gonna do a full cataloging of of recent reads for that. What's your Freudian analysis of the ar Scott Baker books that everybody has a pretty tough time with relationships. For starters is something about death drive maybe maybe anyway, So ultimately Freud gets Freudian right. He says that both the daydream and the act of creative writing, which are really sort of one and the same, thing realized through different means.

He says these are the result of unconscious memories which give rise to an unfulfilled wish, and the wishes then fulfilled through the daydream or the act of creative writing, but in a way that is tempered about the social and moral restraints imposed by society. This obviously is you know, classic Freudian kind of stuff. But you don't have to give any credence to this repressed childhood memory part, which

is probably nonsense to appreciate. There may be some insight in the earlier parts about drawing this connection between the creative process and what's going on in daydreaming. Oh, by the way, if anyone would want, anyone wants like a deeper exploration of like early childhood trauma and Freudian ideas. Uh, there's an older episode of stuff to blow your mind about the work work of hr Geiger and some Freudian

explanations for his His visual style was Gieger or Freudian. Uh. I don't think it was quite a Freudian, but at least one major commentator on his work was and pointed to a lot and basically the the death and birth imagery. Uh. That that that weird. Uh, you know, bio mechanical synthesis of things that are both the vibrantly alive and just

unredeemably dead. Interesting. You know, I can actually see a redemptive arc of of Freudiani is um maybe not so much as a as the best tool for for psychology,

but maybe as like a literary and artistic criticism school. Well, yeah, Like it comes back to what you said earlier about Freud being perhaps more useful today if you think of him as a philosopher and I and I do think there's something to his insight here, like drawing this connection between daydreaming and the creative impulse in order and and and appreciating that the story spinning impulse, whether it's in creative writing or simple daydreaming, is psychologically important, and it

does in many cases fill some psychological need and provide some psychological benefit. But as we're exploring today, can spill over into territory that's clearly not beneficial, such as in the case of Kirk Allen, like we were talking about earlier, where it was interfering with his work enough that his superior has got in touch with Lindner, or in many cases of what has come to be known as maladaptive day dreaming. And we will explore that more when we

come back from break. Thank thank alright, we're back. So now adaptive now adaptive daydreaming. It seems pretty obvious, right, daydreaming that is uh, that is that is maladaptive. That is that is probably not having a good influence on your life. Things are out of balance because of your daydreaming. Right.

It's a term coined by the Israeli clinical psychologist Elie Summer, and Summer defines the term to mean quote, extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning. So essentially, it is fantasizing that interferes with your life. And there's actually been kind of a renaissance of attention to this subject just in the past couple of years. Yeah, there's in particular, there's a there's

an excellent episode of the MPR podcast Invisibility. Uh have you listened to in Visibilia? No? I haven't. Well, I listened to a little clip from this episode, but that's all. It's a wonderful series, and there's one episode in particular that discusses the story of a forty nine year old suburban mother who they referred to as em who's rich in her world, becomes a secret addiction that she keeps

from her family. So she So it's not just that she's escaping into her her day dreams, you know, while she's driving to work, or while she's swimming laps or what have you. Uh No, she's making up excuses and cover stories to go off and dream in this world. Right. So, so this is an adult living a mostly normal life, but she engages in elaborate fantasies about space adventures and saving the Earth and getting sucked into a black hole

and all this. And she's got fictional companions who are her her fictional friends, and she sometimes does this for multiple hours a day. And there's one part that I found very moving where she mentions, one thing about these fantasy worlds is that you know you're going to be understood in them because all the characters are you. On one hand, that's beautiful, but then I also I think of like characters that I've created, and I feel like

most of them probably would not tolerate me. So I don't know if they really would understand me or not. You need to create more sympathetic characters. Probably so, probably so. So you can hear just from that that you know that she she can go to this place to be understood. So it obviously serves some purpose for her. You know, it helps her cope and it helps her feel better

in a way. But it also you know, she wonders if this is doing more harm than good in her life, right, because if if you have to spend all this time in secret doing this thing that you keep secret from your family, I mean this, this is generally not healthy behavior and it's going to lead to a lot of negative effects. So what does it mean for daydreaming to become a problem, a real problem, on the level of a disorder that people would want to seek professional help

to cure. Rob And I don't know if you share this bias, but I feel like in reading about the subject, one of the things that's been really hard for me to get around is a bias I have to think about day dreaming as a just inherently very good and admirable thing. Yeah, I agree, because I, for one am a daydream believer, so I'm gonna always side with the daydream I was just looking at a meme on the Internet that was like has a unicorn on it and it says, don't quit your daydream I mean, and that's

supposed to be a whimsical but encouraging thing to say. Like, I associate daydreaming with the character trait of imagination, which most of us view is a good thing. I certainly do. And think about this, Robert. Imagine you're picking up a new novel and there's a young character in the story who's introduced as always daydreaming, daydreaming through classes in school or something. Do you expect this character to turn out

to be a hero or a villain. I'd say they are either the hero, or they are going about to be tragically transformed into the villain, or they're just an introductory character that's going to be killed by a villainous force before we move on to the actual protagonists. Well, no matter what you're they're sympathetic at this. Yes, definitely, day day dream nous is an inherently sympathetic trait. But I think this is because we usually think about it

in several contexts. Number One, it's primarily an activity of children and the young. Would you agree with that, Yes, If nothing else, that is often seen as you know, it's sort of a childlike quality, right Yeah. Number two, I'd say it's usually done in a positive sense of aspiration and ambition. Like in fictional narratives, daydreaming about a different kind of life is often foreshadowing that that character will actually later get to do those things that they

day dreamed about. Number three. At least in fiction, it's usually grounded within an otherwise functional set of relationships and behavior patterns. It's not usually presented as something that keeps people from doing what's right or having relationships right there, daydreaming is their escape from there, from from their daily troubles. Yeah,

and that's the fourth part. The fourth part is that it's usually brought about by unfair external constraints, Like a child is in an intellectually deadening grammar class and it and it causes that child to say, it's our young heroine to sit there dreaming about, you know, shooting a bow off the back of a horse or about space adventures because she's in this horribly boring, mind numbing scenario.

I certainly feel all of this in general, and so this is this episode is certainly not to cast a negative light on all forms of daydreaming, because there are clearly lots of cases where daydreaming is great, but there are also plenty of cases we've come to understand where daydreaming goes beyond a harmless exercise of imagination and it becomes a destructive obsession, causing harm to the dreamer and

to the people around them. Yeah. I mean, I'd say if daydreaming prevents one from being present when one should be present, or when one wishes to be present, then could certainly be seen as a problem. You know, I think it's one of those, Uh, it could be viewed as one of those chains of iron, chains of gold situations, Right, Like, if you're not present with a loved one due to

worries over past or future events. That's one thing, But isn't it still just as bad as you if you're half zoning out during a conversation with a loved one because there's a space battle going on in your head. It's a fantasy, much in the same way that many of our worries are ultimately fantasies about things going wrong. Yeah, that's a that's a form of daydreaming as well. Yeah, coupled with say, fantasy is about say winning the lottery or finding This is when I still do all the time.

I think it's from from watching various like kidnapping movies. But I'll think, what if I happened upon a garbage can and there's like a like a drop off of money in the garbage and then I get to take off with the money and not of course I won't be killed by the hitmen or the kidnappers or what have you. Uh, surely I'll get away with the money

I just found in the trash can. But it's a stupid fantasy that's still like, uh, you know, I don't dwell on it, but it still flies through my head every now and then two or three times a week tops. You find yourself checking garbage can sometimes. I mean I don't actually dig in them, but I you know, I don't go looking for the money. But for some reason lean and peak in a in a sense like this, just this stupid fantasy will will will rear its head for just a moment, uh, without me even you know,

really thinking about it. One thing I find is obviously media influences what kinds of things we daydream about. Uh, did you notice a lot of people, including yourself during say the late two thousands, when zombie movies were everywhere, constantly thinking about the best place to get to defend from a zombie attack. Oh yeah, I mean that just

that falls into sort of h worst case disaster fantasizing. Yeah, it's like, oh, I'd want to be on top of that building right there, and here's what I'd want to have with me, And mercifully the zombie craze has has somewhat died down. I think people are thinking about that kind of thing. Less, I'm still wondering Freudian explanations to the side, like why do we do that? What's going

on in our brains when we day dream? Like, so you're just hanging out, maybe waiting to meet a friend or something like that, and then you start thinking, like, what would be the best building around here to defend from a zombie attack? What's what's going on in your brain? Then well, this actually brings us back to something we've discussed on the show plenty of times before, the default

mode network. I was looking at a two thousand, seventeen University of Cambridge study that found that the brain network previously associated with daydreaming, that the default mode network also seemed to play a role, an important role in allowing us to perform tasks on autopilot. Autopilot so like when you are say, unconstabed that like highway hypnosis kind of thing, yeah, or I'm yeah doing the dishwasher, you know, or taking taking clothes to the taking the laundry to the washing machine,

that sort of thing. Things you've done so many times that you just kind of zone out and you're thinking about space battles or the lottery or what have you. Um. The researchers here were also very interested in this because abnormal activity in the default mode network has been linked to an array of disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit,

hyperactivity disorder, and disorders of consciousness. And this study in particular found that the default mode network plays an important role in allowing us to switch to autopilot once we are familiar with a task. So it seems fitting that the default mode network should emerge again in an episode on Daydreaming. We've discussed it quite a bit in the past, as as is, this is where we find so much of the worry and anxiety that we seek to escape

through flow states. Um, you know, such as a creative activity like of writing or or would carving or yoga or anything like like this, um, as well as through meditation or you know, some other kind of meditative activity. The default mode network activity is also linked to difficulty in sleeping in new environments. You know, it's just kind of totally find this to be true. Yeah, So you have just like this heightened narrative of things that have

gone wrong and things that might go wrong. And I feel like myself especially, so much of my my life comes down to trying to to turn that that the volume down on that network. You never get a good night's sleep the first time you're somewhere new. Yeah. Furthermore, Daniel Koneman proposed in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that we use two systems to make decisions, a rational system for calculated decisions and a fast system for intuitive decisions.

And this Cambridge study argued that it's the latter system, the fast system, that may be linked with the default mode network. So it sounds as if dreaming is kind of a it's kind of a mistake of cognition, right. A byproduct of it, at any rate are predictive software to envision not only extreme cases of joy or horror, but impossible fantasies. Fantasies they may not even involve us, you know. But that's now that's considering standard daydreaming, which,

as we've discussed, is extremely common. I mean, almost everybody does it. Just to cite a couple of figures on that. For one thing, in the book day Dreaming in nineteen sixty six, Singer reported that nine percent of normal, non clinical adults who were educated and living in the United States day daydreamed at least every day. And so that kind of thing happens most when the person is alone. Right, you are, say, laying in bed at night, getting ready

to go to sleep, and you start to daydream. You imagine, you know, scenarios, you imagine fantasies, Your mind wanders, oh wow, well mind mind does it far more often than that? Well, oh yeah, yeah, but I meant nine percent of people at least do this one a day. Um, And there

there's some evidence that it happens even more often. There's a really good article in the Atlantic from that I'll come back to a few times in this episode, called When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life by Jane Biggelson, and Tina Kelly from its April and the authors there speak to a University of Minnesota psychologist named Eric Klinger who has done a lot of important research on mind wandering, fantasy, and daydreaming, and Clinger says that quote, daydreaming accounts for

about half of the average person's thoughts, amounting to about two thousand segments a day. Oh wow, that's that's quite a lot. Does that match with your number? I mean, try to think about how many times a day do you find yourself daydreaming? I mean the the like, the really critical way of putting this is that we are off task like half the time? Right, Yeah, do you ever find yourself daydreaming while you're sitting right here in

the podcast studio? And I'm talking it's generally less daydreamed. I feel if my mind drifts during podcasting, it's more like worry based, you know, like I mean a bad kind. So but I'm not I'm I'm not going to think about space battles because ultimately our show is the space battle show. Like this, this is a this, this show is an escape. So Robert, you're gonna make me cry, warming my heart over here. But the podcast booth is not airtight. The worries in the fear is still managed

to creep them. Well, obviously there's no way to totally keep them out. And that's one thing. I mean, one difference that I'm already seeing here is the difference between the idea of fleeting mind wandering and moments of daydreaming.

I mean, if if a person is having about two thousand segments of day dreaming a day, those can't last very long, just by the math of time, right, I mean, it's it's kind of like the money and the garbage can like daydreams that are they're regular, but they're just so flee eating that you you don't it's almost like they're not even occurring. They're they're really just like background static.

But when we think back to the story of m or to some of the people that we're going to talk about in a minute, um, it's clear that they're not just having like a moment of a fleeting day dream that comes for a second and then goes and then comes back a few minutes later and goes again. They are having prolonged, involved, continuous fantasies that's spin out at that that spin out stories that have some sense of continuity and that they engage in in a sustained way.

So I think that's a kind of important and interesting difference, and and maybe we can think more about that as we go on. But I mean, one of the things we should take away from this is that everybody day dreams. Normal people do it quite a bit. There's nothing pathological at all about daydreaming. So there's really nothing abnormal about some amount of it, provided that it is really daydreaming and not some form of hallucination or something like that.

I mean, normal daydreaming is a fantasy that subject can clearly distinguish from reality. If you can't tell the difference between your fantasy and reality, then something else is going on, and you definitely have grounds for seeking a mental health professionals help. Right, the situation with m is not that she finds these things the daydream is reality. She just

prefers it to reality. But if it is really just daydreaming clearly delineated from reality, it's also important that it doesn't occur in a way that's injurious to your way of life or to the lives of others around you.

And we'll come back to that in a bit. So One of the things that's interesting about the recent attention on maladaptive daydreaming is just the fact that we went so long with so little psychological recognition of the possibility that excessive daydreaming could be a disorder that caused suffering

in people's lives. Probably the first major work on maladaptive daydreaming was in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy in two thousand two, mentioned earlier by by Elie Summer, called maladaptive daydreaming a qualitative inquiry, and Summer rites first about Freud's thoughts, which we talked about earlier, that daydreaming is this attempted solution to a deprivation state that you know, it's a form of wish fulfillment that's moderated by all these constraints

that society puts on you. But then, of course the idea developed. You've got Hartman and fifty eight saying that maybe fantasies serve some kind of actual adaptive function in the organism. You've got Eric Klinger, who we mentioned a minute ago, talking about how often people spend fantasizing, or how much time a day people spend fantasizing. Clinger said he found in his research that most fantasies, including both sleeping dreams and daydreams, primarily involve current concerns, you know,

stuff that you're thinking about right now. So like you're probably more likely, you know, not dreaming about space adventures, but about what's in your email, yeah, or perhaps say your your evening plans, daydreaming about that or particular video game or film you're looking forward to right yeah. Or interpersonal conflicts that's a big one. How common is that dream of I'm having an argument with Jeffrey finally, and

here's what I would really tell him. See now, this is an area where I feel like it's still daydreaming, but one might easily categorize it more as simply worrying and rehearsing for strife. You know, That's what a lot of what daydreaming is, and like imagining scenarios is a way of thinking about what you should do. But people when when they talk when they talk about daydreams sort of that they're very positive spin on it, you know, where they say, oh that that Dan, he's such a

he's such a daydreamer. Nobody's thinking, oh that Dan, he's just always trying to think up what he would say if he had the courage to, you know, confront his boss or something. Right, Yeah, that's that's the good dan. The dan we like is the one who's daydreaming about swash buckling on Mars and you know, flying flying around the ridges of Phobos. The dan you do not like is the one who's thinking, like, here's what I should have said to Jeffrey. I should have told him that.

But I know that is a common thing. I know people all the time or thinking about either what they would say if they had the guts to, or what they should have said in that argument they had yesterday, earlier today, and that at least it can be in a in the short term now adaptive for a lot of us, you know. I mean, you have like something kisses you off. The next day, it can be difficult to focus on the things you need to focus on, or to be present when you need to be present,

because you're just running the same dialogue through your head. Well, you know, I actually have a kind of counterintuitive view about the virtues of venting. People often talk about how they had a bad day at work and they need to vent, you know, and that's like I need to just let off all the steam and talk about it.

I noticed that in myself and in other people, venting very frequently does not alleviate frustrations but makes them worse because you just get to talking about it, and then you keep talking about it, and it makes you more obsessed with the issue then you would have been otherwise. What it makes me think of the scene in Poltergeist too, where um, the dad coughs up the awful Giger creature and then it crawls off, Like that's what I feel like.

Sometimes venting feels like it's like, oh, it's out of me, but now it's out of me, and it's disgusting and horrifying. Way to go. It's under the bed. Well, I think if you're going to vent, I think you should try to keep it short. You know, you should say what you got to say, but don't dwell on it. If you're dwell on it, it's it's just worse for you. So pinch off that Giger and you know venting, Yeah, that's all right, let her go. But then okay, so

back back to Summer. So Summer's chronicling the history of this idea before before we get to maladaptive daydreaming, itself, and in and eighty three he points out how Wilson and Barber discovered there's this group of people that they class as what are called fantasy prone personalities who were avid day dreamers, and these people tended to quote live much of their time in a world of their own making,

in a world of imagery, imagination, and fantasy. So these people sort of have the ability to like pick a theme and not just think about it a little bit, but watch a scenario unfold in their imagination almost with the same kind of continuous quality as a person would watch a movie. They estimated that this group of fantasy prone people with sort of high fantasizing capabilities is about four percent of the general population, or up to four percent.

Other studies on fantasy proneness found somewhat similar numbers, maybe between four percent and six percent of people, but also

found some interesting correlations. Fantasy prone adults had often been encouraged to fantasize by a significant adult in their lives when they were younger, and also uh fantasy proneness is correlated with aversive childhood environments, with some studies finding that though it's about four to six percent maybe in the general population, it was at a rate of maybe nine to fourteen percent in people with the history of childhood abuse.

And this sort of goes along, you know, in a in a limit, it did way with the Freudian idea, right that if you had some kind of inversive environment when you were a child, you had some kind of thing that you wanted to get through, you didn't want to be present in the unpleasant reality you were living, you would learn to come up with fantasy environments to cope. And they also found that fantasizers were more prone to

depression and other issues. And we should we should be clear that fantasy proneness is not necessarily the same thing as maladaptive daydreaming, because there could be people who are prone to fantasies, but it doesn't necessarily interfere with their lives. And of course, when we're talking about ed adversary and trauma, I mean it's it's not necessarily just like a situation of like physical abuse, right, but just say, um, yeah, you know problems at school or we have we always

have to remember how how difficult say a move can be. Uh, family picks up and moves from one suited the other, you know, changing schools, etcetera. Yeah, exactly, or social problems, social isolation, um, any kind of family problems. I mean, I think things like that can drive a child inward

and and send them to their inner resources. I mean, I know, as you've probably described, I mean you've had experiences like this, right, oh yeah, yeah, like you know, moving from one school to another, of being an example, or being in a school where you basically all of middle school. I think this can Middle school was definitely a time that drove me inward in a way that I probably never quite returned from. Middle schoolers really are

the worst that is, like the worst age of humanity. Now, another strain of research that emerged in the twentieth century was that while healthy people use daydreaming to kind of work through problems or to enhance good feelings, distressed people can often enter into a kind of negative feedback loop with daydreams in a lot of the same ways that you could see other addictions coming into playing people's lives, where the excessive day dreaming causes them to feel weak

or inadequate or generally bad about their lives for various reasons. They might be you know, missing out on things that it's causing them problems, and then the problems in their lives are driving them to want a day dream more so they can escape from their lives. It reminds me the line and the Warren Zevon song Splendid Isolation. We're saying, Mickey, take my hand and lead me through the world of self. WHOA what albums that on? Was that the eighties? Oh?

I'm not sure when I got into the Zevon I was the greatest hits album? Uh oh, I see it. So I'm not exactly sure where one finds that in its original form. You're one of those Yvon posers. You're one of those those are sadly sadly uh so. So clearly there are different kinds of daydreaming right there, people with different levels of proneness. For some people it helps,

for some people it hurts. And so Summer was trying to get a flavor of what this was like when people claim to experience maladaptive daydreaming symptoms, and so he used a qualitative methodology to assess people who presented with what seemed to be negative patterns of daydreaming, which again he coined this term maladaptive daydreaming. And so here here's what he found common themes of daydreaming tended to be violence, idealized self power and control, captivity, rescue and escape, and

sexual arousal. And I think that's kind of interesting because it's strange how much it sounds like a list of the most common themes and adventure stories. Yeah. I mean, basically the that list could be the narrative flow of a swashbuckling tale, uh huh. And then common functions he identified apparently were disengagement from stress and pain by mood enhancement and wish fulfillment fantasies. And then the other main

one was for companionship, intimacy and soothing. So he they are all kinds of examples that he cites in his paper from the interviews, I just picked a couple of the more vivid ones to mention. Not all of them are this action movie like, but I want to read one of the quotes. Quote. I used to imagine America and the West at war against the Communist lock. There were bombardments, shelling, marine landings, and hand to hand battles

in which the Communists would have many casualties. I imagine that my hometown is in ruins and under occupation, and I am fighting a guerrilla war with the underground. Sometimes I imagine myself fighting the guerrillas as part of the occupying forces. I often imagine myself as a soldier in battle against terrorists. I kill scores of them. The shooting

fantasies relieve my tension. It sounds like red Dawn, yeah, basically, and it also reminds me of these the zombie apocalypse fantasies we discussed earlier right, which can clearly serve as a form of mental empowerment and escape. Right and then also, like both of these examples, a simpler worldview and which clearly defined lines of good and bad, of of of enemy, and ally. Here's another one quote. I am seated on the field of a football stadium, surrounded with barbed wire.

I am chosen by the prisoners to negotiate with the captors because she is known to be an emotionally disassociate ated person, hence not susceptible to psychological pressure. I am allowed to walk toward a desk with two chairs and sitting in the bigger one. My opponent is putting forth his demands and threatens me with a gun. I pour myself a hot drink and sit from it with stable hands, smile at him and tell him that I am suicidal, so he cannot threaten me with anything because I've got

nothing to lose. He realizes he lost the bargaining, and I give the sign for the insurrection to begin. From now on, it's like a Hollywood action movie with explosion, smoke and lots of blood. Although I am wounded, I managed to free most of the prisoners and I leave them to safety. I love this because I get a real Garth Marenghee dark place five from it. Blood, blood and bits of the sick. It's such a great, great show. Now.

One of the really interesting things that I've found when reading about maladaptive daydreaming, and that's reported in this study, but then also in some others, is that there are some common pros sesses associated with this, with obsessive or maladaptive daydreaming UH processes having to do with physical place and physical action, often with an object in the hand. Robert, you mentioned earlier when you were a child that you would day dream with a rubber band in your hand,

manipulating it with your hands always. I had to have a rubber band, and you it had to be green or red. It couldn't be just the brown ones because they weren't they weren't exciting enough. And also this this is I guess maybe this sounds kind of strange, but the the red and green rubber bands were explosions. And I would also make explosion noises as explosions were needed in these imagined scenarios, because apparently there were a lot

of explosions. Well, I mean, given our samples, sometimes explosions if you got to happen. I want to read a quote from one of the subjects in Summer's study quote. When I daydream, I often hold an object in my hand, say an a racer or a marble. I taw sit in the air. This repetitive monotone movement helps ME concentrate on the fantasy. Daydreaming is easier when I do this because I don't get distracted by other things in the room. At other times, I would go down to the basement

and pace for hours while daydreaming. Also from the same patient, sometimes I would go into an orchard behind my house. Nobody comes there. I like the solitude because I could act the fantasies out loud. I can shout and scream there without shame. And these are commonly reported elements having a place to go to, being in physical motion while doing the daydreaming, like pacing or driving or something like that, and having an object to manipulate in the hand. Why

that that is so interesting to me? Why those things? Yeah, it really makes me think back on my my own imaginative behavior as a kid, for sure. All right, well, let's take a break and when we come back we will continue and conclude our exploration of maladaptive daydreaming. Thank

thank thank you. All Right, we're back now. We mentioned earlier, there's a good piece in The Atlantic about maladaptive daydreaming from by Jane Biggleson and Tina Kelly called win day Dreaming Replaces Real Life that has some really good stories in it about what this experience is like. So I just wanted to read maybe a couple of quotes from this article of the author describing her own experience. She writes, when I was eight years old, I had a game I like to play in my front yard in suburban

New Jersey. My siblings were older and mostly out of the house. My parents worked long hours, and when there was nothing much to do, I'd walk in circles while shaking a piece of string, daydreaming about Little House on the Prairie or the Brady Bunch. One afternoon, I created an episode where instead of going to Hawaii, where dangerous spiders lurk, the Bradys went to the Bahamas, where I had just been a week with my family. Greg Brady

met my teenage sister there and they started dating. The show playing in my head was so detailed and entertaining that it lasted forty five minute. Another day, I imagine myself as the actress who played the seventh Brady sibling. I met all the other young actors on set, and they commented on my cute outfit and amazing acting skills. Again, the string in her hand, the object to manipulate. Yeah, I totally get it. I it's hard again, it's it's it's difficult for me to put it into words, but

I know exactly what she's doing there. And the author goes on to chronicle how with her experiences of of of obsessive daydreaming going on throughout her life, she eventually came to investigate this issue full like she got involved in the subject of maladaptive daydreaming at the research level, and she was a test subject in some research and one of the things she found was that, So she went in for some brain imaging for some fm R I to look at what's going on in her brain

while she's actively daydreaming, and one of the things they found was quote, great activity in the ventral stree atom, the part of the brain that lights up when an alcoholic has shown images of a martini. It's so it's literally setting off some kind of addiction response type feeling cheaper and healthier. Though right, probably healthier, but not necessarily better for your life. I mean, depending on what the

circumstances are. I mean again, we we certainly don't want to demonize healthy forms of daydreaming, but for many of these people, they end up seeking communities online for people who have the same issues as them, or seeking clinical help because these people realize, like, this is taking up so much of my life, it is making me unable to live my life, it's interfering with my work, with

my relationships, it's it's gone beyond its useful role. One of the other things that's interesting that gets pointed out in this article is the possible overlap between maladaptive daydreaming and a disorder that's been known as stereotypic movement disorder, which involves repetitive motions of the body, kind of like what we've been talking about with like pacing or repeatedly UM moving you know, an object in the hand like often SMD seems to have something to do with flapping

of the hands or movement of the arms or something like that. And one of the things the authors talk about is that UM. There was a study that studied children who have stereotypic movement disorder forty two children, and this was in two thousand and ten. And when the researchers in the study asked the kids what they were doing when they were performing their repetitive motions, eight three percent of the of the kids said they were repeating stories in their heads. So it sounds like there may

be some overlap with this existing known condition. And again I wonder what is the neural link between the motions of the body and the internal storytelling impulse. Well, it makes me think back to the more recent study we talked about discussing default mode network and the being on autopilot, Like maybe there has to be some sort of autopilot thing you're doing, and it could be swimming or or

pacing about, but also just manipulating an object. Maybe you're not actually performing a task but in in object manipulation or you know, some sort of basic tool use uh and it maybe it's a necessary part of that network. Yeah, that that could be. You know, one of the researchers in this article who gets quoted talks about how there's a possibility that day dreaming is somehow kind of like a fever, Like it is a natural defense mechanism. It's

a cognitive defense mechanism for dealing with cognitive threats. Um. But it can, of course, like a fever, be harmful if it gets out of control. And for some people this defense mechanism, while in some cases useful, it does get out of control for them. What that makes sense too? And when you think about the ways that that writer's end up exploring, or not just writer has been any kind of a you know creative individual is doing some

sort of art or something. To consider their art, you know, you end up processing a lot of your own anxieties and fears and hopes and dreams the who that art? So it maybe and maybe that is just and something that's overlaid here and not part of the actual uh you know, origin of the the impulse. But maybe there's a connection. Yeah, well, I mean I often think with with like works of fiction. It's funny when people ask authors like to interpret their own work in the light

of their biography. You know, you hear that. It's like, oh, you wrote this character in this novel, who does this? What is that? You know? How does that relate to your life? This thing that happened to you? I feel like you've got it backwards. You should be telling the writer how what they wrote explains their life. The writer doesn't know. Yeah, yeah, like like often the writer has to sort of have the realization like, oh, well, I guess I guess this story was about, you know, my

substance abuse problem or what have you. You You know. And speaking of substance abuse, of course, I mean one of the things that comes up again and again in these reports is that some of the people who experience maladaptive daydreaming compare it in way in some ways to an addiction. Going back to you know what some of the brain imaging seem to show we mentioned a minute ago, is that there isn't an addiction like response in the brain, and then some people subjectively describe it as being like

in addiction. One of the people quoted in the Atlantic article says, I felt the daydreaming was my main reality and I only peek out into the main world now and then it's like I'm an alcoholic with an unlimited supply of booze. I can't turn it off. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, you don't have to worry about becoming physically ill from too much daydreaming, or falling over from too much daydreaming, etcetera. Like there, it seems like there are fewer obviously their limits, but there are few

are hard limits involved there. Yeah, that's true. But as we've seen, of course, it can be a strong interference with the kind of life people want to live. And that's the reason there are all these you know, support groups and and a push to get this more recognized in in psychiatric and psychological treatment communities now, and there are some treatments that that seemed to be coming along.

I mean, we're still in the early days of understanding maladaptive daydreaming as a psychological condition that that is treated in a clinical way, but some are in his two thousand two articles found that therapy helped some patients with aspects of their maladaptive daydreaming, including reducing violent themes in the daydreaming and reducing the amount of time spent on it. There are some drugs that in some cases have been found work. Fluvoxamine, which is primarily used to treat obsessive

compulsive disorder, has apparently been used with some success. Other patients have had some success with S S R. Eyes. One of the most interesting things I came across was also from that Atlantic article that it referred to one person with maladaptive daydreaming who said quote, I recently found that constantly writing wandering thoughts down or keeping track of them, keeps you from falling into intense daydreaming. So the act of right, I mean this brings it back to the

Freud issue with like creative writing versus day dreaming. The act of writing down your creative thoughts somehow makes them stop flowing so hard, And I mean I know that from experience. Sometimes it's almost like weaponizing writer's block against your own imagination. You run the risk though then of you know, you write down the ones that you think I promise and then that to fill you with with

joy on some level. But then you don't maybe you don't write down the ones that are like stupid and uh and and awful, you know, the ones that are that are that fall into that special category of you know, because yeah, I feel like, especially people who are write up like horror or anything horror esque, you know, they're they're liable to turn their fears into something useful, into

something artistic and artistic expression of their fears. But what do you do when it's just something dumb, Like it's dumb and it's hurtful, uh, dumb and hurtful day dream that you've got to make us like a special activity, I guess, of extracting it, of putting it on paper

and then just watting it up and forgetting about it. Well, you know, I wonder, so there's the common experience of people sort of daydreaming by writing their lives into the existing plots and storylines of other TV shows and books and stuff like that. I wonder how often this type

of daydreaming phases into just writing fan fiction. Oh yeah, because you're you're I can see that where that could that could occur because you're just so into this world, you know, and then you you can't help it, want to become a part of it. Yeah, I can't help.

But wonder in general if if some people who have this condition would find relief through just creative writing, like if you force yourself to write kind of like this this last person was saying, if you force yourself to write your creative thoughts down, that might only not just limit them, but also give you something productive you can do with that time you spent. So you don't just say, well, I spent three hours daydreaming today, I don't know you

know where that time went. You could say I spent three hours writing today. Well, not only do I think that's a great idea, but I totally support anything that will create employment opportunities for my fellow creative writing majors. Well, I think we have to accept that not all writing can be writing for money, and that's okay. But you know, if somebody is trying to tell you to write, they should be paying you money. So let's bring it all

back to good old Kirk Allen. Okay. I mean, ultimately, we just don't have a lot of hard facts about about who he was or what he actually went through. But I wonder how we can apply everything we've discussed in these two episodes to his case. Yeah, I mean I wonder if he would have directly fit this emerging diagnosis of the maladaptive daydreamer. Um, and I don't know.

I wonder what we what we will continue to learn about maladaptive daydreaming in the in the coming years, and whether that will shed any new light on the Kirk Allen story. Yeah. And of course we have a lot of listeners out there who to write in and share their experiences with us. And I know that all of you have experiences with daydreaming, and I imagine there are going to be some of you who have experience with maladaptive daydreaming or something that in self analysis feels close

to what we've described here. So we would love to hear from you. And of course we can keep things anonymous if if you would hope, if you want to do it that way, sure, um, you know so, certainly just stress that point when you when you reach out to us. But yeah, we want to hear from everyone about your day dreams. If you have had maladaptive daydreaming, what have you found, if anything that has helped you reduce that down to a tolerable level or helped you

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