Fantasizing, Maldaptive Daydreaming, and Paracosms

Gwern

Fantasizing, Maldaptive Daydreaming, and Paracosms

2019-05-16^–_5y2025-03-24 finished certainty: possible importance: 3

How common are, and what is going on psychologically, in the occasional eruption of large shared¹ fantasy worlds (“paracosms”) among children & adolescents?

There are many cases of a (typically pubescent, typically female, similar to mass psychogenic illness) child or adolescent building such an intense fantasy-world that they wind up sucking in & convincing family/friends/classmates. J. R. R. Tolkien’s worldbuilding may not have started early enough to be an example of this as his cousins & his worldbuilding was almost exclusively linguistic, but the Brontë sisters are a clearcut famous case. They typically go unreported except in extreme cases (such as the Parker-Hulme murder case ², the Trianon Moberly-Jourdain incident (Castle1991, Archibald2023), possibly June and Jennifer Gibbons, the Slender Man stabbing, the Manchester stabbing), often reported only in passing³, as background material⁴ or via anecdotes. For example, I have been told of 4 cases (3 from acquaintances, one indirectly), all of which follow the same pattern of a young female teenager building up a fantasy world (with heavy input from dreams) and engrossing friends/classmates (with the exception of a male twin pair, see also cryptophasia).

But there doesn’t seem to be any recognized name for this pattern (“chuunibyou syndrome”? “Tlön syndrome”? “Terabithia complex”? folie à plusieurs) or discussion of epidemiology.

Is it an expansion of maladaptive daydreaming? Is prevalence underestimated due to childhood amnesia (similar to how imaginary friends are not anomalous but may be had by the majority of children, though they forget as adults)? Being so extremely private & introverted & embarrassing by nature, how many such shared paracosms never get mentioned, or hide under guises like D&D campaigns, fantasy (fan)fiction writing, micronations, occult hobbies like astral projection/“shifting” (likely actually lucid dreaming)? Are the dynamics the same as proto-religions (the ways in which the paracosms are extended, particularly by dreaming, bear a great deal of resemblance to the origins of religions like Christianity)?

As distinguished from cases of elaborate private fantasizing like the case of Kirk Allen (“The Jet-Propelled Couch”: “Part I: The man who traveled through space”/“Part II: Return to Earth”, articles republished in The Fifty-Minute Hour, Lindner1955; see also “Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch: Cordwainer Smith and Kirk Allen”, Elms2002), or from the extensive but temporary fantasizing of children at play (well-depicted by the 2 sisters of Bluey).↩︎
Perhaps more representative than outright murder of a parental figure is the loosely-inspired-by-Parker-Hulme fictional Simpsons episode, “Lisa the Drama Queen”, involving running away; the perennially popular novel A Little Princess involves heavy elements in the shared fantasizing of Sara & Becky about her father (particularly in the 1995 movie). Another example, involving both running away & parricide, is in the Berserk manga’s 1997–1998_28ya “Lost Children” arc, where Kentaro Miura appears to’ve taken pains to emphasize that it was not as simple as lesbianism by depicting both as attracted to the male protagonist. (The psychological horror game Rule of Rose may be another example; it is interesting that the developers aimed to ‘capture the “mysterious and misunderstood” nature of girls’, and wound up writing a story about a pair of girls creating a twisted-aristocratic Alice In Wonderland-like paracosm which ends in murder due to unreciprocated love.)↩︎
An example is Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias:

As Wang narrates the Slenderman story, she revisits her own memory of a fraught childhood imagination. Her young mind has been captivated by the world of The NeverEnding Story, a 1984_42ya film depicting a fantasy world that eventually includes its reader in the narrative. Wang describes convincing her best friend Jessica that their life, too, was just another thread in the story, crafting a complicated universe of rules to dictate their time together. “We’re just playing, right?” Jessica finally asks, bemused and a little frightened; Wang’s childhood self disagrees, telling Jessica that the imaginary world was, in fact, real: “With my every denial, she became increasingly hysterical while I remained calm. I watched her leave in sobs; I remained grounded in the world of my imagination.”

↩︎
eg. Silver Sisterhood coverage focuses on the commune/games although, as far as can be divined through their secrecy & pseudonymity & deception, their “Aristasia” sounds like a paracosm, and one which given the ages of the central women when they came to prominence in the 1980s & their reaction to the 1960s, likely started around adolescence and with a specific girl. The timing of “the Elf Queen’s Daughters” also sounds characteristic.↩︎

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