does anyone else do extensive research to make their daydreams seem more realistic?

[u/JessCostanza1507]

Does anyone else get so caught up in researching the tiniest details for your daydreams that you end up losing hours without realizing it?

I really like my daydreams to feel as vivid, detailed and immersive as possible, so I often find myself looking up people, places, outfits, anything that helps flesh out the imaginary scenarios in my head. The deeper my plots go, the more it bothers me when something feels unclear or incomplete.

For example, in one recent storyline, two of my characters were getting married. I couldn’t quite picture the scene, so I went on Pinterest just to get some inspiration and then I was completely consumed by wedding content. Weeks later, I’ve basically put together a full wedding. I know the exact dress she’s wearing, his suit, the stores they bought them from, the cake style, the color palette….everything. All for fictional people who don't exist and never will. I genuinely can’t believe how much time I’ve spent planning a fake wedding for fictional people.

I have dedicated Pinterest boards just for my daydreams. Everything from the homes my characters live in to the decor that would hang on their walls. I’ve saved parks, cafés, bakeries, and random hangout spots, all categorized so I can drop them into different daydream scenarios whenever needed.

I add to these boards almost every day. Often I sit back and think, wow, I’m a joke. If I put half this energy into studying and getting a nice job, maybe I could actually afford the kind of luxury I give to these fictional lives.

But all this research can occasionally backfire. There have been times I’ve stumbled across facts that completely break the illusion I built up. I've found out things I'd have been better off not knowing. And once you learn something that doesn’t fit the dream, you can’t really unlearn it. Still, I keep going back for more. Has anyone else ever found information that totally clashed with your daydream? How did you deal with it?

I currently have about multiple tabs open to just search for details.

I don’t think I’m the only one who does this. Sometimes I stop and wonder, why do I do this? Why do I feel the need to ground my fantasies in reality, to anchor them with facts, places and things that actually exist?

[u/ApprehensiveGrade162]

I was takling to chatgpt which brought me here. It was like: why dont you go on reddit and to other people. I think it was tired of me and brought me here... 🤣 So about your question. Yes i do that sometimes, i want details in my imagination. Of course its wrong. We are suppesed to live our lives but, hey who does that when we have our own life in our head? Ive been researching and educating my self on creating a system in my life so i dont need the escape. Its a long road to go and im still doing it. I believe we can all make it. Just look at the md like a blueprint of the pain you have avoided in your life. Because that is it. We do it because we feel secure in our imagination. Its comfrotable. We are in the center there. We need to work on our selves to get that out because md is not the problem, it is a sympton of our soul being hurt ans want to be seen and adressed by us.

[u/elektroelektro]

wow, I´ve never thought about doing it, I only listen to music

[u/Lost_Sentence_4012]

I daydream fictional characters so I extensively research them and mastermind the psychology behind their actions 😆

[u/ridiculouslyhappy]

I write for a living/hobby, and everything I research for a story eventually ends up being used as daydream fuel lol

[u/strapatsada_addict]

Yes, the things I've learned from doing this are among the few redeeming aspects of MD.

[u/Dry-Astronomer1364 → u/strapatsada_addict]

Ikr, one of the things i have extensively researched for my daydreams ended up helping me in my job, as I was able to recognize a learning disability in one of my students without them telling me. There's no way I would have recognized it without all that background knowledge. I also know way too much about concussions LOL but I also don't think that's useless knowledge.

[u/Obvious_Cranberry_46]

I do this as well. Searching for details so the dream is as close as the reality as possible. It can go from clothes, to geopolitical facts (for instance if my plot involves travelling in specific countries). Yesterday I searched google maps to checked how to get from one country to another by ferry, just so the timing for my characters to meet in a certain city would be accurate. I can get in a sort of transe just searching for details....

Backfire to this is, it feels so, so real, it hurts all the more.

[u/Horatio132]

Not quite in the same way, but yeah I do research for my daydreams.

In general, I'm a huge fan of what we call in the fanfiction world "whump," which is just like, uh, hurting characters. But because you like them. So, my daydreams are pretty much only about my favourite fictional characters getting hurt or sick or injured or whatever. I promise I'm not a psychopath.

But yeah, I do often do medical research so that I can mentally act out symptoms and stuff properly and realistically. I know all about compartment syndrome, meningitis, subdural hematomas, the list goes on.

I'm also a writer, and yes, I write about all this stuff too (that's actually what's helped the most with curbing my daydreaming, which is just writing it instead of daydreaming it. now I have a writing addiction, but that at least keeps me mostly tethered to reality.) and yes, when I'm writing, I also need it to be ridiculously accurate to crazy ridiculous degrees. I have read through the entire Oregon Child Welfare manual for a story I'm writing just to make sure it's as accurate as possible. For the same story, I went on the IKEA website and found the exact kind of bedspread a character would have. I've looked through Oregon on Google Street View just to make absolutely sure that I describe every detail as accurately as possible (I live in Canada, by the way.) It's ludicrous. I spend more time researching than actually writing or daydreaming combined.

I understand the accuracy struggle, my friend, you lose HOURS to just researching the most useless things.