IN your mind, you’re an athlete, an award-winning musician, an actor, or even an idol. You have millions of admiring fans, your family is incredibly proud of you, and you have a loving, supportive, and loyal partner. A superstar. A hero. The one who is loved, admired, and simply unstoppable. But then the fantasy abruptly stops. You realize you’re lying in bed, your phone in hand, earphones in, and a TikTok edit of a celebrity playing repeatedly on your phone. How much time has passed? A couple of minutes? Perhaps hours? For some, it’s the entire day.

     This seems to be a common experience for a lot of people. In fact, those on the internet have been using a specific term to describe this type of behavior. They call it “maladaptive daydreaming”. It’s not an official mental health diagnosis, and it’s not included in any edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). But it is a persistent problem. Now you might ask, how is daydreaming a problem? Isn’t it normal? Everyone does it. And while that is true, daydreaming becomes harmful when it distracts us from our reality. It becomes a problem when you intentionally daydream instead of completing your homework. It becomes a problem when you intentionally daydream instead of hanging out with real people. Harvard Health describes it as the act of engaging in prolonged periods of daydreaming, often hours at a time, as a way of coping with a problem.

     So no, maladaptive daydreaming is not the same as your typical daydreaming. It’s excessive, disruptive, and distracting. And like anything excessive, it’s harmful. Research on this phenomenon describes having sleep problems or insomnia, unconscious and repetitive movements like twitching or rocking back and forth, along with a general struggle to stop daydreaming, as symptoms of it. People tend to “lose themselves” in their vivid dream scenarios to the point that they’d forget that they could exhibit real reactions to their fantasies. They’d only stop when they realized they laughed out loud, smiled at a blank space on their wall, or tried to hit someone who wasn’t there.

     While the idea of escaping to this perfect, alternative world feels safe, we cannot let it distract us from the realities of the world that we are currently in. Our imaginative and creative minds are influential, and should help us enhance our lives, not replace them. Our realities might feel boring, stressful, and more hurtful than what we want for ourselves, making us want to escape to a better one every now and then. But we must be really careful to avoid getting trapped in a world that is only ours, while the real one passes us by day by day. So while everyone escapes to their minds sometimes, we risk getting stuck in a dream that we want to become more real than reality. A dream that offers comfort and joy but quietly steals our time, energy, and sense of self. A dream that is slowly stealing our lives.