A case of excessive and highly structured daydreaming
Mind Hacks reports on a Consciousness and Cognition article about a "36 year-old woman with a long history of excessive daydreaming where she'd spent long periods of time wrapped up in a fantasy world." The woman is not mentally ill, and can tell the difference between the real world and her daydream universe.
Her condition reminded me of the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter in The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales by Dr. Robert Lindner. The chapter was about a Los Alamos physicist who had been sent to Lindner because he was acting strangely at work, often going into a trance-like state. Because the physicist had a high level security clearance, his superiors were quite worried about his odd behavior.
It turns out that the physicist believed himself to be John Carter, the protagonist in Edgar Rice Burrough's series of science fiction adventure novels that take place on Mars. The physicist was coincidentally also named John Carter. The physicist told Lindner he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes! I won't spoil the rest for you. It's an incredible story. (You can read the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter through Google Book Search)
I first read A Princess of Mars, Burrough's tale of adventure on the red planet, when I was in junior high school. (Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush.) A few years ago I re-read A Princess of Mars, prepared to be utterly disappointed. But I loved it just as much as I did when I was 12 years old. Burrough's description of the Martian animals and societies, particularly the hideous six-limbed green Martians', is a hoot, and the plot moves along at a fast clip. It unfolds much like a contemporary science fiction movie. It's fallen out of copyright, and you can download it for free from Project Gutenburg's site.
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Walter Mitty did this ages ago... read some Thurber, kidlets.
"Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush."
Brother, I hear that!
-- MrJM
Real life is mundane, difficult, insane and sad. A very lucky few get to live in a fantasy world where their dreams can come true. Why must we enforce our version of reality upon them? Why must we insist no one escape the misery of truth? Why do we end a dream and call it a "cure?"
For as long as I can remember I always slipped away, several times a day, to daydream.
I didn't realize this was unusual... how do the rest of you pass time when you're bored?
what if Darger had been smart?
@ Takuan
Maybe it'd look more like Urville?
I'm wondering how much this overlaps with Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind theory.
You can also read what looks like a scan of a first edition online via google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ws18cmj5ic0C&printsec=titlepage&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPR7,M2
I think I got that link from BB.
@3: Watching the numbers on the clock slowly tick higher and higher...
@#6 - so when you're bored you quote movies?
"now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new"
Actually I would be the last person who wants or needs cheap thrills in whatever colours, I'm perfectly happy on my own, thinking away to myself, but what I meant was what do you do when you're in a boring meeting, or class, or long car trip?
some people have natural mystic transport (to quote Trevanian), an ability to fugue at will. Some can only do it in their dreams.
It's likely the protagonist of The Jet-Propelled Couch was Cordwainer Smith.
If you aren't familiar with Smith his short stories are amazing and he wrote a novel, Norstrilia, which is kinda like Dune but with giant sheep instead of sandworms.
#2 Lobster, if you follow the link, the woman self-reported herself for psychiatric help because her daydreaming was causing her distress. Not because it was causing OTHER people distress.
It's not everyone else forcing her to be "normal".
Pixar to release JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 2012.
I tried reading the Barsoom novels but I just couldn't get into them. I could never get past the part where the human-like Martians came from eggs.
#11: I've heard that that theory was debunked.
I've read almost everything that Smith wrote, and the "Jet Propelled Couch" essay.
Possible? Yes. But there are a lot of people in the world and there are probably many who are crazy in similar ways.
Never heard of Walter Mitty?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitty
Linebarger? Now that IS remarkable. There was something about Norstrilia that never left me.
pockekta?
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=LGtdHcLmAQM&feature=related
BTW, Librivox has a free solo-read audiobook of A Princess Of Mars. It's read by Mark Nelson, who in my opinion is a pretty swell narrator.
http://librivox.org/a-princess-of-mars-by-edgar-rice-burroughs-2/
I hate my life. I would be happy to spend extended periods of time in fantasy.
well, I guess that's one reason I read all the time.
#2 Lobster & #12 Jerril: What Jerril said. In fact the article quotes some other researchers going to some lengths to defend daydreaming as a valuable trait. Except, the problem this woman has is the effort of managing her life to hide her daydreaming from others.
Does anyone know the website she found?
Hmm. Superficially, I'm unconvinced by the idea of Cordwainer Smith/Paul Linebarger as the original of the patient in "The Jet-Propelled Couch", if only because the link #11 posted describes the patient as imagining himself to be "... living a heroic life as 'Lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire'". If that were a description of Burroughs, it would fit: the John Carter books read like megalomaniac wish-fulfillments (angry Burroughs fans please note that the John Carter books are one of my guilty pleasures, and I probably enjoy them as much as you do; no disrespect is intended), first-person narratives told from the point of view of a man who suddenly finds himself to be the strongest, fastest, handsomest man in an exotic world populated by beautiful naked women.
Smith's books are the opposite; his stories are mostly told in the third person and from the point of view of the underdogs (sometimes literally, i.e. D'joan), rather than powerful planet-ruling Lords. They're the antithesis of the kind of heroic fantasy where problems are solved with the sweep of a sword or the blast of a raygun. They're subtle, low-key and poetic.
If Smith/Linebarger really was Kirk Allen, he must have undergone a total reversal after psychology cured him: instead of using his previous daydreams of being an all-powerful planetary ruler as raw material for his writing, he must have thrown them all pretty much out of the window when he actually started writing SF.
"The physicist was coincidentally also named John Carter. "
There are no coincidences.
Lookforthewoman @4: I read, and occasionally I think about writing.
I daydreamed a lot -- SFish stuff -- as a kid and young teen.
Then I got into roleplaying games, which are kind of rigorous rule-bound daydreaming.
Then I got into writing material for roleplaying games. (Latest: GURPS Alphabet Arcane, out just last week.) Creating these things involves a sort of purposeful daydreaming. And I get paid a little for it!
I do this but I really don't think it should be causing her such distress. It does present with a sort of difficulty in social situations: when you faze out and begin daydreaming and you're supposed to be listening to somebody, they get upset when you fail to respond to them. But honestly it just takes a little work to pay more attention to the person in front of you. It's not like you don't have control of your daydreams. The only problem is realizing that you're in one, but if you know that you're prone to it you can prevent one from happening in the first place.
If you have difficulty focusing your thoughts on something that you need to, then that is the problem. Imagination is not the issue here.
I shouldn't say realizing you're in one is the issue. It's realizing that it's happening. Since you block everything else out for the fantasy, it just doesn't occur to you that it's happening until some time has elapsed and by that time the person you're "listening to" is done with what they were saying.
But really, just focusing on the present will prevent one from happening in the first place.
Re: people who say it happens because of boredom.
Actually I think it happens when something is interesting. Somebody says something different I may not have thought about before and my mind leaps to the topic, constructing a discussion of it. That's why I space out in class or while reading.
My father once told me, if you're bored, you must be a boring person. I never said I was bored again, after that statement.
I don't day dream when I'm bored. I day dream when I have time, and consider it like mental exercise. I learn a lot from my fantasies, as wells as I learn from my waking active life. In fact, considering that daydreaming is as much a part of real life, there is not dichotomy from them, in my mind.
Being married, I miss my trips to "Aetherwhere", which I could take for days at a time and enjoy with a level of clarity and sensation that others not used to such travels could not understand.
Don't knock it until you try it. I am never lonely without a book, lets just put it that way.
#1 & #17: I see your Walter Mitty and raise you HP Lovecraft: "Polaris" (1918) and "Celephaïs" (1920).
Does daydreaming refer exclusively to "spacing out"--where you lose track of what people around your are doing, or can it just refer to detailed imaginings?
Yesterday I was in a thesis discussion with my advisor and was having an incredibly difficult time concentrating because I was simultaneously, in some part of my brain, having an argument with my mother. I wasn't unaware of my advisor--we continued to hold a conversation--but I wasn't terribly intelligent about it because some part of my brain was rather forcefully insisting on rendering a fictional scenario.
I would think this counts as daydreaming, as well.
Also:
Dejah Thoris?
I most certainly did not!
Re: #15
Its not like the calcite shell of a chicken's egg. The "egg" is actually more like a thickened amniotic sac that is "birthed" late in pregnancy. The thick sac walls contain all the nutrients the fetus requires, and will grow thinner as they are consumed, ultimately allowing the child to break free when "hatching".
Some confusion is understandable as even Martian doctors would have difficulty explaining it to an Earth audience. To maintain the pace of the story it was unfortunately necessary to pass over some details.
I don't wish to be in poor taste, but the menstruation of Martian women, while less frequent, is a far more significant event compared to Earth women. Martian men tend to keep their distance for many reasons during such episodes.
It's rare to daydream like that? I used to always drift like that in high school. People even told me it was a little creepy, since I would just get a blank, glazed expression on my face. This story doesn't sound unique to me at all; hell, I even have some short stories written (only on my computer, of course) about my little daydream adventures.
The cover of the first edition of "Fifty Minute Hour" is an amusing pastiche of floating technicolor brains! http://www.yunchtime.net/?p=87 Having read the Jet-Propelled Couch article I found myself unconvinced about the Linebarger connection. The psychotherapy patient, Kirk Allen, apparently was involved in a weird sado-masochistic and somehwat bestial tryst with his nanny... how that could end up contributing to the singular beauty of "Scanners Live In Vain" or in the magical resistance of the "Underpeople" isn't altogether clear. The connection between Lindner and Cordwainer Smith is based on Leon Stover's claim, which later was immortalized in Aldiss' "Billion Year Spree." It's not supported by any other concrete evidence so far. But you never know!
I recall reading that Phillip K. Dick spent the latter half of his life thinking that he'd crossed over from an alternate timeline which he later wrote about- could this be an example of this phenom?
Many of my daydreams were of a sexual nature (you do not want to know-- but nothing illegal outside of the hated state of Virginia). And once they all came to pass, they passed away. Gone. Done and dusted.
I can attest that before realization they were almost all consuming: at the time before sleep; at breakfast, at any other random time of the day... is this day-dreaming? "Fetishism" you might call it just because I myself have labeled these dreams as having sexual tones. What's the difference?
I'm sure if Lindner had actually gone to Mars, he would have been fine.
YMMV, of course.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. I read A Princess of Mars after finding out about the character through The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. II. I couldn't help but register disgust the entire way through. Number one, it was boring. Number two, it came across as racist, the way the former Southern soldier goes to a land of primitives and helps save them. The entire thing was full of horrible race analogues. Alan Moore's five panels had a much more compelling character than the entire John Carter series.
i, too, am puzzled, saddened, and not a little bit incensed by the "cure" of kirk allen. lindner admits that the fantasy was, itself, a curative device (and, further, that all psychoses are), and goes out of his way to underline the fact that, except that his superiors were a mite worried about 'im, it caused no distress to allen or anyone else... excepting lindner, himself (and one gets the idea that he was just jealous!). some will say, "he couldn't have sex!". i say neither could newton, insofar as we know, and he believed, extremely strongly, in alchemy and a magic guy that lived in the sky. so what?
I'm Cordwainer Smith's daughter and webmaster of a site about him. Here's my page where I discuss whether he might have been Kirk Allen:
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/was-paul-linebarger-kirk-allen-.htm
In a nutshell, I really don't know. I think this thread makes some good points against the idea. And I certainly don't remember a major "before" and "after" switch in my father. But then, as a teenager, how much attention was I paying?
Rosana, glad you made it to the thread. Thanks for link and the input :)