You can keep your imagination — you just don’t have to lose your life to it.
When your inner world starts doing more living than your real one, the cost isn’t just wasted hours. It’s missed deadlines, frayed relationships, quiet shame, and the slow erasure of the person you meant to be. For years I woke up with plans and fell asleep having lived entire lives that never showed up on my CV. I was not lazy. I was captive.
I didn’t realise how much time I’d lost until a university grade snapped something into focus. I’d always been creative, habitually slipping into elaborate scenes in my head, imagined conversations, perfect comebacks, entire alternate lives and I’d thought it made me thoughtful, dreamy, maybe unusually introspective. But the grade was worse than I expected. I could point to tiredness, to a bad week, to the professor’s curve, but underneath all of it there was a pattern I hadn’t named. I kept showing up late to study sessions, I skimmed readings while my mind rehearsed movie scenes, and I handed in work that was half-baked because entire afternoons had evaporated inside my head.
A friend sent me a link one night: “Have you heard of maladaptive daydreaming?” I clicked, read, and then read again. The description, richly detailed, repetitive fantasies that interfere with life, fit me like an old coat. For the first time I had language for what felt like an embarrassment and a private shame. I was not alone. That fact, small and enormous at the same time, changed everything.
Starting a career made the problem loud. Work demands, meetings, commute, new responsibilities, there was no comfortable excuse for disappearing for hours. I wanted to stop. I told myself I would simply chooseto stop. That lasted as long as most rigid promises: a weekend, a day, a heroic morning. The pull of those imagined worlds was gentle and comforting and deceptively persuasive. They soothed me in ways real life often didn’t. I didn’t want to kill my imagination. I wanted it where it belonged: under my control.
So I began looking for a way to live with it, not against it.
The first thing I did was stop trying to shame myself into quitting. Shame never helped. Instead I started tracking. For one week I wrote three things every evening: when I’d drifted most, what seemed to trigger it, and one tiny experiment for the next day. That simple record, no judgment, just data was like turning a vague whisper into a map. I could see patterns: transitions (walking between classes, staring at a blank document), low-energy afternoons, specific loneliness triggers.
Once I had the map I built a handful of habits that actually worked for me:
None of these were magical. There were relapses. Some weeks sucked. But the combination of curiosity, structure, and small wins slowly changed the default: from “I get lost” to “I notice I’m starting to get lost.”
Over time I realised the shift I wanted wasn’t to eradicate daydreaming that would have been neither realistic nor desirable but to control when, where, and how long those episodes happened. To be able to stop living inside my head and start using it as a tool: for creativity, for processing emotion, for problem-solving, not as an escape route that stole whole days.
Out of months of trial and error I organised the steps into a consistent sequence: gentle assessment, foundation-building, active skill practice, and long-term integration. I turned my scattered notes and trackers into a 15-week, methodical programme, not because I suddenly felt like teaching everyone, but because having a map helped me keep going on the weeks I wanted to give up.
If you’re interested in learning more about the programme, you can find it here: https://singularityrh.gumroad.com/l/controlmaldaydreams
If this resonates, you’re not failing, you’re trying to manage something that evolved to help you cope. In the next pieces in this series I’ll share the actual practices I used (the trackers, the exact structure of those first weeks, and the turning-point routines that made the difference). For now: you’re not alone, and you can learn to be the person who decides when the dream begins and ends. If you want to share one sentence about your biggest trigger, I’ll read it and I’ll reply.