An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-25).
Dreaming while awake? The case of maladaptive daydreaming
We spend roughly half of our waking hours engaged in thoughts unrelated to our immediate task. Occasionally, we might become rapt to those thoughts and lose ourselves in our imagined worlds, yet come back to our usual activities. In some others, we might get stuck in those worlds. This is the case in “maladaptive daydreaming” (MDD; Somer, 2002), a very compelling and extensive sort of fantasising. MDDers report engaging in highly realistic waking fantasies for hours at the expense of their daily responsibilities and interpersonal relationships. Such is the disruption of MDD that some researchers have advocated for its inclusion in the DSM-V, considering it a form of “daydreaming disorder” (Somer et al., 2017) or “compulsive fantasising” (Bigelsen & Schupak, 2011). However, some others have shown scepticism about the need to create a category for a new form of mental disorder—does MDD actually constitute a malfunction of an imagination-related mechanism?
In this talk, I propose that what makes MDD distinct is the mode of consciousness that it instantiates, one that is more similar to a dream-like state than an ordinary form of waking imagination. MDD involves a significant shift of attention to the imagined world, leading to a breakdown of our ordinary self-awareness: MDDers feel strongly related to their imagined ego. I motivate this proposal by examining recent proposals in the psychological literature characterising MDD as a state of dissociative absorption (Soffer-Dudek and Somer, 2018)—a state where our attention is directed to the imagined world to the extent of disregarding the factual world. I then examine what distinguishes MDD from other immersive forms of imagination and fantasising by arguing that, in the case of MDD, there is an inability to shift one’s attention back to the factual—in a way, one’s attention is stuck in the imagined world.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
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