As a lifelong daydreamer, I find staring at a wall or at the floor for a bit while the gears are turning in my head to be a nice little reprieve from the daily drudgery. I don’t want to permanently move into my daydreams, though. Real life still has its perks. But for some, daydreaming is an inescapable trap. As the BBC recently covered in a report about people who spend a majority of their days locked in an extended daydream, imagination can turn into an all-consuming nightmare.A condition known as maladaptive daydreaming, or MD, affects an estimated 2 to 4 percent of adults. In the most extreme cases, these perpetual daydreamers spend up to 12 hours a day locked in these complex narratives that can stretch into decades of their real lifetime. They aren’t experiencing a fleeting flight of fancy before snapping back to reality. They are living in fully developed narrative universes fueled by their own imagination.People who experience MD describe it as an addiction, a compulsion that they can’t help but continuously dive back into. Makes sense. They are, in essence, crafting their own version of reality, their own little pocket universe where things are exactly as they want them to be, as they wish them to be. That much power and control can overtake anyone. But, as one woman, Kyla Borcherds, told the BBC, while her fantasies started as a safe place she could exist within to get some reprieve from a childhood of bullying, the daydreams started to get longer, more involved.‘The Fantasy Begins to Harness the Person’Again, sounds pleasant, like reading a book or watching a movie, but it’s all yours, and it exists in your own mind. But, as explained by clinical psychology professor Eli Somer, one of the preeminent researchers studying the phenomenon: “The problem arises when the person no longer harnesses the fantasy, and the fantasy begins to harness the person.”The problems come in when the daydreams start interfering with people’s lives, when getting lost in a fantasy of one’s own creation becomes more appealing than reality, especially for the lonely, those dealing with trauma and depression, those on the autism spectrum, or those who are sufferers of OCD or ADHD. But once the episode ends, it leaves the daydreamer with a sense of shame and regret, fueling a cycle that launches them right back into it to escape their feelings.Maladaptive daydreaming is not yet recognized in the DSM-5, though some clinicians, such as Somer, are already treating it as such. There is no treatment, though there is some promising early clinical evidence indicating that targeted psychotherapy can address MD’s triggers.The post The Little-Known Condition That Traps People in Their Own Imaginations appeared first on VICE.