Who are you in your daydreams?
Your daydream self might say the thing that in real life you didn’t or couldn’t say, or that didn’t occur to you at the time. Perhaps in the inner world you’ve created, you’re wanted in the specific way you need to be wanted, or admired for a particular thing that no one, not even you, associates with you elsewhere. You might move differently, or even not look like ‘you’ physically at all; perhaps you inhabit an entirely different body. Or maybe it’s simpler: you feel more coherent, more fully yourself there than you do in your everyday personal, domestic or working life.
If any of that sounds familiar, I wonder if you’ve also had the unsettling thought that often follows from it: which one is the real me?
Escaping to, not escaping from
People sometimes assume that maladaptive daydreaming (MD) is a form of escapism. In one sense, that may be true. Certainly, it can serve as a way to avoid difficult feelings or aspects of ordinary life that feel hard to manage. In the short term, at least, that can make uncomfortable or painful emotions easier to bear, albeit at a cost (Mancinelli et al, 2024). But what’s actually happening is likely to be more complicated than that. For many maladaptive daydreamers (MDers), MD may be less about escaping from themselves than finding somewhere they can be more of who they are, or who they might have been.
When Eli Somer first described maladaptive daydreaming in 2002, drawing on interviews with six patients in a specialised trauma practice, one of several recurring themes he identified was what he termed the ‘idealised self’ (Somer, 2002). Although idealised circumstances and worlds were also present, what’s striking for my purposes here is the extent to which the daydreamers created compensatory narratives featuring an idealised version of themselves. In their daydream worlds, they were able to be the person they would have liked to have been.
In MD online communities, too, the daydream self, or ‘para-self’, is sometimes described as an ‘upgraded’ or perfect version of who the person is in real life. It can also be a kind of ‘corrective’ to the ‘defective’ self a person believes themselves to be, or believes they appear to others. Of course, what that imagined version of the self looks like is highly individual. It may be more confident, attractive, successful or socially connected, but it may also simply be a self who is able to do things, feel things or have relationships that seem difficult or impossible in ordinary life.
That makes me wonder whether the term ‘idealised self’ always completely captures what’s happening. The person you are in your daydream isn’t necessarily a better version of you at all. Rather, they may be a version of you who’s less constrained by the expectations, shame or experiences that have shaped who you feel able to be elsewhere.
You might be assertive in your daydream when you’ve learned to keep the peace in real life, openly affectionate when intimacy feels exposing, or admired for something about yourself that has rarely been recognised by other people.. Perhaps you inhabit a body that feels more comfortable to you, or a social world in which being different doesn’t bear the same consequences.
This doesn’t mean that the person you are in your daydream is somehow your ‘true self’, waiting to be discovered. Nor does it mean that there is necessarily a particular experience or relationship in your past that explains why that person exists. But it does raise an interesting question: what does your inner world make possible that feels difficult to experience elsewhere?
Identity, shame and the self that gets to exist
Examining the origins and meanings of such idealisation has continued to interest researchers. I’ve written elsewhere about the potential overlaps between maladaptive daydreaming, developmental trauma and neurodivergence. For MDers who report experiences of early relational trauma, daydreams may offer an alternative life to a painful reality in which they experienced rejection, neglect or abandonment (Somer, Somer and Jopp, 2016).
More recent research has begun to explore the relationship between MD, identity and shame more directly. Lalani, Somer and Abu-Rayya (2025) found that for some people they interviewed, daydreaming had begun or intensified during periods of distress connected to aspects of identity such as sexuality, culture or disability that had, at some point, felt unacceptable or shameful. That doesn’t mean that difficulties around identity cause MD, or that this is part of everyone’s experience. It does, however, offer another way of thinking about what might be happening in an inner world. If you learned early on that being obviously different, whether because you were gay, disabled, your mind worked differently, or for some other reason, resulted in rejection, ridicule or being misunderstood, an inner world where none of that applies can become somewhere it feels safer, and perhaps even restorative, to go.
Shame about an important aspect of your identity may deserve attention in its own right rather than being viewed merely as background to something else. If you’ve been made to feel that an integral part of yourself is unacceptable, your daydreaming may have become, among other things, somewhere that part of you doesn’t have to carry that particular burden of shame. But if you feel more ‘yourself’ in your daydream, and that self seems so different from the person you are in ordinary life, it’s understandable that you might feel unsettled or confused by the question of who you really are.
The parts that live there
This doesn’t mean that every immersive daydream has to be about identity, or that maladaptive daydreaming always has a single origin that we can pinpoint. In my psychotherapy practice, though, I hear certain themes coming up again and again.
When important relational needs go unmet, particularly over long periods, an inner world may become somewhere those needs can be imagined, explored or partially met. Researchers working with MDers’ accounts of their experience have found similar themes around early relational experiences, attachment and the functions that daydreaming can serve (e.g., Somer et al., 2016).
This is one reason I think the question of identity in MD is more complicated than simply asking whether someone is imagining a better life. Sometimes the imagined life contains a version of the person who can participate in relationships differently. And that can leave a painful discrepancy between the self you experience in your inner world and the self you have learned to present, or feel able to be, in everyday life.
In my client work, we sometimes use a ‘parts’ perspective to make sense of the different ways a person experiences themselves. We all have ‘parts’ who may have developed in response to particular experiences, each carrying something important. Thinking about maladaptive daydreaming like this means that the part of you who exists in your daydream world doesn’t have to be viewed as an imposter, a symptom, or evidence that something’s gone wrong. It’s a part that took on a job. It may have developed to offer hope that seemed impossible in your real-life circumstances, or to allow a version of you to exist that wasn’t safe to show anywhere else. It may, for example, have offered you companionship in a childhood or adolescence that was lonely or isolating.
Whatever the particular circumstances were, it makes sense to become curious about what that part has been trying to do for you, rather than assuming that the existence of the daydreaming means something is fundamentally wrong with you.
Take someone who grew up being the reliable one, for instance: the child who noticed when a parent needed bolstering up, who learned to keep their own disappointments small in order not to add to anyone’s load. It’s understandable if a part of that person sought to create somewhere where they didn’t have to be reliable, where they could be looked after, be difficult without repercussions, or just be the centre of their own story rather than a supporting character in someone else’s.
The daydream self might therefore hold more than an idealised image. It might hold experiences that have been difficult to access in ordinary life, including the possibility of being cared for, being seen, being powerful, being desirable, or simply being able to take up space.
That doesn’t tell us what the daydreaming means in any individual case. It gives us somewhere to start asking questions.
When the daydream becomes the only place you’re whole
The difficulty is that a part can take on a protective role in response to particular circumstances, and then become burdened with carrying too much. That part is still trying to do its job even when circumstances change.
Research into how people who identify as maladaptive daydreamers describe their own experience has found that many people effectively name the weight of maintaining a world that has been keeping them going, and the real exhaustion at how much of life now runs through it (Nowacki and Pyszkowska, 2024). That tension, between what the daydream self makes possible and what it costs, is something I’ll talk about in more detail elsewhere.
For now, what interests me is what can happen when the distinction between the inner and outer selves becomes increasingly painful. If the person you are in your paracosm feels more real, more coherent, more genuinely you, what does that suggest about the person answering to your name in the outside world?
Sometimes the fear runs deeper than which self is real. It’s that neither is. The person you are as you move through your everyday life can feel hollow, as if you’re just going through the motions of a life in which you never become the person you could or should have been. You may function perfectly well on the outside, while feeling that the person doing all this isn’t fully inhabiting their own life. And the person who feels more like you, the one who exists in the daydream, doesn’t quite count either. You know that they’re not real because you made them up.
That can be a more painful place to find yourself than simply choosing between two selves. When you try to answer the question of who you are really, nowhere feels like you’re standing on solid ground.
If you feel like this, your pain is real and deserves to be taken seriously. But the answer doesn’t necessarily lie in deciding which version of you is the authentic one. A part of you created a world in which what seemed impossible on the outside could exist. It’s remarkable to think of what went into it: knowing, consciously or otherwise, what that world needed to contain, and constructing somewhere capable of holding it. I don’t see that as evidence of emptiness on one side and invention on the other. Rather it may tell us something about what you needed, and about how resourceful you were in finding a way to provide some of it for yourself.
Not which self is real
I realise that you might want an answer to the question I posed at the start: which one is the real you, the person who daydreams or the person who doesn’t? But that question, understandable as it is, creates what we could see as a false dichotomy. Both are you in some sense, but in what way is something to explore. Your daydream self doesn’t necessarily represent everything you should try to bring into your everyday life, just as your everyday self isn’t necessarily a less authentic version of you. The point is that both tell us something important about how you experience yourself.
When I work with maladaptive daydreaming psychotherapeutically, I don’t see our aim as figuring out which self is authentic and which is a distraction, a defence, or something to be corrected. Rather, I’m curious about what each part of you has had to become, and why, and what it might mean to let them know each other rather than keeping them in separate worlds.
Exploring your MD with a therapist who understands what it is might eventually mean having more choice about when and how much you daydream. It might indeed mean bringing some of the qualities that exist there into your ordinary relationships and your everyday life. It might also lead to other ways of meeting needs beyond that inner world. Or you may arrive at a different understanding of what you want from your daydreaming. The important thing is that we don’t have to decide that before we understand what the daydreaming has been doing, and we don’t have to rush. In my experience, this is slow work. We start by taking seriously the fact that something in you built an entire world rather than go without whatever it was that was missing and that you needed.
Is this you?
This article is for you if you’ve ever wondered whether the person you are in your daydream is more you than the person answering emails, doing the school run, or unable to speak up in a social situation. It’s for you if your daydream self seems to have qualities that you recognise as somehow yours, but that feel difficult to access in ordinary life. It’s also for you if your daydream self seems a million miles away from anything you imagine possible in the real world. And it’s for you if you’ve ever wondered what happened to the person you might have been.
You don’t need to already know what you want to happen to the daydreaming or understand what its purpose has been before exploring it in therapy. If any of this resonates, I offer a free 20 to 30-minute initial conversation so you can get a sense of whether working together might suit you, with no obligation to proceed beyond that.
Garthine Walker is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist based in Cardiff, offering online therapy across the UK. She specialises in trauma, attachment wounds, neurodivergence, burnout and maladaptive daydreaming.
References
Faisal M. Lalani, Eli Somer and Hisham M. Abu-Rayya (2025). ‘Dreamers of the day: an exploration of identity, shame, and maladaptive daydreaming’, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 27:4, 462–482. DOI: 10.1080/15299732.2025.2599755.
Elisa Mancinelli, Sara Spisto, Vinay Jagdish Sukhija, and Silvia Salcuni (2024). ‘Maladaptive daydreaming as emotion regulation strategy: exploring the association with emotion regulation, psychological symptoms, and negative problem-solving orientation’, Current Psychology, 43, 28578–28589. DOI: 10.1007/s12144-024-06487-3.
Ari Nowacki and Anna Pyszkowska (2024). ‘The everchanging maladaptive daydreaming: a thematic analysis of lived experiences of reddit users’, Current Psychology, 43:35, 28488–28499. DOI: 10.1007/s12144-024-06506-3.
Eli Somer, Liora Somer and Daniela S. Jopp (2016). ‘Childhood antecedents and maintaining factors in maladaptive daydreaming’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 204:6, 471–478. DOI: 10.1097/NMD.0000000000000507.