Now, it's not in the mental health bible, aka the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and doctors don't know what causes it. M worries that she has a newly diagnosed condition known as maladaptive daydreaming. They fell in love, married and had a child, and for a while, the daydreams subsided.īut as life became more middle-class and mundane - dishwasher unloading, toothpaste in the sink - she found herself sneaking back into a world where she was the hero, the boss and every character in between. Then one day by chance, M met with a former classmate who drew her out. So she kept up her daydreaming in secret, hiding from friends at school, pretending to read a book, plugging in earphones to make it appear as if she was listening to music. M began to realize her daydreaming was not normal when her mother yelled at her and asked her why she was moving her lips. This made her feel loved, accepted, even understood. She imagined herself as many characters, blasting off to other planets, fighting crime and just generally saving the day.

She was a girl who felt isolated and misunderstood, so she began spending hours at a time on the swings in her backyard, daydreaming. In the episode, and in the animation above, we meet M, a woman who worries that her intense daydreaming is interfering with her actual life. In Episode 5, they're investigating how it feels to live 'in between,' to be in two worlds at once. Welcome to Invisibilia Season 4! The NPR program and podcast explores the invisible forces that shape human behavior, and we here at Shots are joining in to probe the science of why we act the way we do.

Maladaptive dreaming download