Is This Real Life? (Is This Just Fantasy?)

   I did some research on daydreaming, which concept I stated before I don't understand. I still don't quite understand it, as definitions vary, but all of them seem to have in common a detachment from reality while remaining conscious. No mention is made how closely this relates to plain old imagination, but from what I can understand, daydreaming actually represents some form of altered state of consciousness. The daydreamer actually believes the events are coming to pass, to varying degrees.

   What the heck? So, daydreaming is basically a hallucination? I've stayed awake for 72 hours before just so that could happen to me without taking any dangerous and/or illegal drugs, and you're telling me that most people do it so often than they don't even know when it's happening? Asperger's buh-lows.

   I don't think this could actually be right. But it might be. That's what my sources are telling me. Why is there not more research into this? People regularly drop off into hallucinations or other forms of dissociation from reality, while remaining fully conscious? I'm not sure if I'm reading the data wrong, is the thing. Maybe it just describes spacing out. But the reality-blurring aspects would seem to say otherwise. Do people have such a shaky grasp on what is and is not fiction?

   I think I'm able to comprehend it now, but it's like Frank Jackson's thought experiment of the fully colorblind person in the perfectly black and white room, who learns all there is to know about color and then cured of colorblindness. Do they know anything more now that they know what color actually looks like rather than just how it works?*

   Looking at the Imaginal Processes Inventory, which was developed to quantify daydreams, I'm somewhat disturbed. It's really quite surreal to me, like touching down on an alien landscape. Maybe it's like that to other people, too, and only a very special class of people would answer "my thoughts seem as real as actual events in my life" to the affirmative. But of course I specifically target this question. But some of the others, especially those on emotional and visceral responses to daydreams, and the exact degree of visual and auditory sensation to the daydream...

   So, from what I can tell, there's a spectrum there, depending on exactly how the mind of the subject in question functions. Makes sense. I still don't understand how people would be able to confuse their own fantasies with reality while conscious (but then again, my last post was on expecting real-life manifestations of fictional tropic examples (It had been with me for a while, and I still knew that it was about a work of fiction, though.))

 * -- while Mary isn't necessarily depicted as colorblind in the original paper, I think it just makes more sense this way, don't you? There's a difference between physical knowledge and conscious, anyway...


Jackson, Frank. 1990. "Epiphenomenal Qualia," in 'Mind and Cognition,' W. Lycan (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.