When Daydreaming Becomes a Prison: Dr. Eli Somer’s Discovery

Dr. Eli Somer is the Israeli psychologist who first identified and named maladaptive daydreaming, a condition where vivid, absorbing fantasy becomes so consuming that it interferes with real life. His research, beginning in the early 2000s, gave language to something millions of people had experienced privately but never had words for.

Maladaptive daydreaming sits in an unusual space. It is not listed as an official diagnosis in the DSM, yet the people who experience it describe profound disruption to their daily functioning, relationships, and sense of self. For introverts and highly sensitive people especially, the inner world can be so rich and compelling that the pull toward fantasy feels less like a choice and more like gravity.

Much of what I write about on this site touches on the inner lives of introverts, and this topic sits at the heart of that conversation. Our Introvert Mental Health Hub explores the full range of psychological experiences that shape how introverts move through the world, and maladaptive daydreaming adds a particularly layered dimension to that picture.

Who Is Dr. Eli Somer and Why Does His Work Matter?

Dr. Eli Somer is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Haifa in Israel. He has spent decades studying dissociation, trauma, and the ways the human mind creates distance from painful experience. His work on maladaptive daydreaming emerged from his clinical practice, where he noticed a pattern among clients that did not fit neatly into existing frameworks.

In 2002, Somer published what is widely considered the foundational paper on maladaptive daydreaming, describing it as extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning. What made his contribution significant was not just the naming of the phenomenon, but the compassion embedded in his framing. He did not pathologize the imagination itself. He recognized that the capacity for rich inner experience is often a gift, one that becomes problematic only when it starts to substitute for living rather than enrich it.

I find that distinction meaningful. As an INTJ, my inner world has always been a primary workspace. I process ideas internally before I speak them. I rehearse conversations, map out scenarios, and spend considerable time in my own head. That is not dysfunction. That is how I think. Somer’s framework helps draw the line between a rich interior life and one that has turned inward to the point of avoidance.

What Does Maladaptive Daydreaming Actually Look Like?

People who experience maladaptive daydreaming often describe elaborate, plot-driven fantasy worlds populated with recurring characters, emotional arcs, and detailed settings. These are not passing daydreams or brief moments of mind-wandering. They can last for hours. Some people describe pacing while they daydream, or needing music or repetitive motion to enter the state. The fantasies feel vivid and emotionally real, sometimes more satisfying than actual life.

Somer’s research published in PubMed Central helped establish a clinical picture of the condition, identifying common features including the presence of triggers, difficulty stopping once the daydreaming begins, and feelings of distress or shame about the behavior. Many people with maladaptive daydreaming report hiding it from everyone in their lives.

That secrecy piece resonates with me in a specific way. Running advertising agencies for over two decades, I worked with creative teams full of people who had exceptionally active inner lives. I remember one senior copywriter on a major retail account who would disappear mentally in the middle of briefings, not out of disrespect, but because her mind had already raced ahead into a fantasy space where the campaign was fully formed and alive. She was brilliant. She was also struggling with something she had never named. Looking back, I wonder how much of what she described as “zoning out” was closer to what Somer was documenting.

Why Are Introverts and HSPs Drawn to Intense Inner Worlds?

Highly sensitive people and introverts share a common orientation toward depth. Where extroverts often seek stimulation outward, introverts and HSPs tend to process experience inward, layering meaning onto events, replaying conversations, and constructing rich interpretive frameworks around what they observe. That depth is genuinely valuable. It produces empathy, creativity, and insight.

Yet that same depth can make the inner world feel more manageable than the outer one. When external life carries too much noise, too much demand, or too much pain, retreating inward offers relief. For highly sensitive people already dealing with HSP overwhelm and sensory overload, the inner world is not just appealing. It is quiet. It is controllable. It is safe in ways the external world often is not.

Somer’s clinical observations consistently pointed toward a link between maladaptive daydreaming and early experiences of loneliness, trauma, or environments where a child’s emotional needs went unmet. The fantasy world becomes a coping mechanism, a place to feel seen, powerful, loved, or simply at peace. Over time, the mechanism becomes habitual, and the habit becomes compulsive.

There is also a connection to anxiety worth examining here. The National Institute of Mental Health describes generalized anxiety disorder as involving persistent, difficult-to-control worry. Many people with maladaptive daydreaming report that fantasy functions as an anxiety regulator, a way to step out of the worry loop and into a world where outcomes are under their control. That temporary relief is real. The cost is that it prevents the development of more sustainable coping strategies.

For HSPs who already carry heightened emotional responses, the appeal of a controllable inner world is even stronger. HSP anxiety often involves a nervous system that registers threat more intensely than average, making the retreat into fantasy feel not just appealing but necessary.

How Does Somer’s Research Connect Daydreaming to Dissociation?

One of the more nuanced aspects of Somer’s work is his exploration of the relationship between maladaptive daydreaming and dissociation. Dissociation involves a disconnection from one’s thoughts, feelings, surroundings, or sense of identity. It exists on a spectrum, from ordinary highway hypnosis to the more severe dissociative disorders.

Somer positioned maladaptive daydreaming within this dissociative spectrum, arguing that the absorbing quality of the fantasy state shares features with dissociative experiences. Further PubMed Central research has examined how maladaptive daydreaming correlates with other dissociative symptoms, finding meaningful overlap particularly in populations with trauma histories.

What strikes me about this framing is how it recontextualizes something that many introverts and HSPs have likely experienced without labeling it. The feeling of being present in your body while your mind is somewhere else entirely. The way a compelling internal narrative can make an hour vanish. The slight disorientation of returning to the room after a particularly absorbing mental episode. These experiences exist on a continuum, and Somer’s work helps map where ordinary absorption ends and something more clinically significant begins.

For people with deep emotional processing tendencies, that line can be harder to locate. HSP emotional processing already involves sitting with feelings at a depth that others may not understand. When that processing happens inside an absorbing fantasy rather than in direct engagement with real experience, it can feel productive while actually functioning as avoidance.

What Role Does Shame Play in Maladaptive Daydreaming?

Shame is one of the most consistent features in the accounts of people living with maladaptive daydreaming. They describe hiding their fantasy worlds from partners, friends, and therapists. They feel embarrassed by how much time the daydreaming consumes. They worry they are broken, childish, or fundamentally unable to engage with real life.

That shame is compounded for people who are also highly sensitive. HSPs often carry an additional layer of self-criticism, particularly around traits that feel socially unacceptable. HSP perfectionism can turn the experience of maladaptive daydreaming into evidence of personal failure, feeding a cycle where shame about the behavior increases the emotional pain that drives the behavior in the first place.

Somer has spoken about the importance of reducing this shame in therapeutic contexts. His approach emphasizes understanding the function the daydreaming serves before attempting to reduce it. That matters enormously. Trying to eliminate a coping mechanism without understanding what it is coping with tends to create more distress, not less.

I spent years in agency leadership trying to project a version of myself that matched what I thought leadership was supposed to look like. Confident, decisive, comfortable in every room. The shame I felt about being someone who needed quiet, who processed slowly, who found large social gatherings genuinely draining, that shame drove me toward compensatory behaviors that were exhausting and in the end unsustainable. I did not have maladaptive daydreaming, but I understand the mechanics of shame-driven concealment well enough to recognize how corrosive it is.

The rejection sensitivity that often accompanies HSP traits adds another dimension here. HSP rejection sensitivity means that social disapproval can register as genuinely painful, making the fantasy world, where the person is accepted, understood, and valued, feel like an essential refuge rather than a harmful habit.

How Does Maladaptive Daydreaming Affect Real Relationships?

One of the more painful aspects of maladaptive daydreaming is what it does to real-world connection. When the fantasy world offers more emotional satisfaction than actual relationships, real people can feel inadequate by comparison. Partners, friends, and family members cannot compete with characters who behave exactly as the daydreamer needs them to. Real relationships require negotiation, disappointment, and repair. Fantasy relationships do not.

For highly sensitive people who already process social interactions with considerable intensity, this dynamic can be particularly pronounced. HSP empathy means absorbing the emotional states of others deeply, which can make real relationships feel both profoundly meaningful and genuinely exhausting. The fantasy world offers connection without the cost of that absorption.

Somer’s clinical work has documented cases where people with maladaptive daydreaming preferred their fantasy relationships to real ones not because they lacked the capacity for connection, but because the fantasy felt safer. There was no risk of rejection, misunderstanding, or loss. That preference, over time, can erode the social skills and emotional tolerance that real relationships require, creating a widening gap between the inner world and the outer one.

I managed a team of about eighteen people at one of my larger agencies, and I had one account director, a deeply introverted and perceptive person, who told me once that he had entire parallel conversations in his head with clients before meetings. Not preparation, exactly. More like a rehearsal world where he had already worked through every possible response. He found real meetings anticlimactic because they never matched the precision of what he had imagined. That is a milder version of the dynamic Somer describes, but it points to the same underlying tension between the controllable inner world and the unpredictable outer one.

What Does Current Understanding Say About Treatment and Support?

Because maladaptive daydreaming is not yet an official diagnosis, there is no standardized treatment protocol. What exists is a growing body of clinical experience and a community of people who have found their own paths through it, many of them connecting through online spaces where Somer’s work gave them vocabulary for their experience.

Therapeutic approaches that have shown promise include cognitive behavioral frameworks focused on understanding the triggers and functions of the daydreaming, mindfulness practices that build tolerance for present-moment experience, and trauma-informed work where early experiences of loneliness or pain are addressed directly. PubMed Central’s overview of dissociative disorders provides useful context for understanding how dissociation-adjacent experiences are approached clinically, even when they fall outside formal diagnostic categories.

Somer himself has emphasized that the goal is not to eliminate the imaginative capacity, which would be both impossible and undesirable, but to restore choice. The person with maladaptive daydreaming has often lost the ability to choose when to engage with their inner world and when to be present in their life. Rebuilding that capacity for choice is the therapeutic aim.

For introverts and HSPs, this framing is important. The inner life is not the problem. The loss of agency over it is. The American Psychological Association’s work on resilience consistently points toward the value of developing flexible coping strategies rather than eliminating any single response. That flexibility, the ability to choose presence or reflection based on what the situation calls for, is exactly what maladaptive daydreaming erodes.

There is also something worth saying about self-compassion in this process. Academic work on perfectionism and self-criticism suggests that harsh self-judgment tends to increase avoidant behaviors rather than reducing them. For someone whose daydreaming is already driven partly by a need to escape self-critical thoughts, adding more self-criticism to the mix is counterproductive. Somer’s approach consistently models a non-shaming stance, and that modeling matters for how people approach their own recovery.

What Can Introverts Take From Somer’s Framework?

Even for introverts who do not experience maladaptive daydreaming in its clinical form, Somer’s work offers something valuable: a more precise language for talking about the relationship between inner life and outer engagement.

Many introverts have experienced periods where the inner world felt more real or more rewarding than the external one. Periods of grief, social rejection, burnout, or simply the cumulative weight of living in a world calibrated for extroverts. In those periods, the pull toward retreat is understandable and often healthy. Somer’s framework helps identify when that retreat has shifted from restoration to avoidance.

The questions worth sitting with are practical ones. Is the daydreaming enriching your life or substituting for it? Are you returning from your inner world with more capacity for engagement, or less? Do you feel you could stop if you chose to, or does the fantasy feel compulsive? Are real relationships and real work becoming harder to sustain?

Those questions do not require a clinical diagnosis to be worth asking. They are questions about the quality of your engagement with your own life, and they matter regardless of where you fall on any spectrum.

My own version of this reckoning came during a particularly difficult stretch running a mid-size agency through an economic downturn. I found myself spending increasing amounts of time mentally rehearsing alternate versions of decisions I had already made, not productive analysis but circular, consuming what-if loops that served no purpose except to keep me out of the discomfort of the present. It was not maladaptive daydreaming in Somer’s clinical sense, but it was a version of the same underlying dynamic: using the inner world to avoid the outer one. Recognizing that pattern was the first step toward doing something about it.

If this topic connects with other mental health experiences you are working through as an introvert or highly sensitive person, the full Introvert Mental Health Hub covers a wide range of related subjects, from anxiety and emotional processing to sensory sensitivity and self-worth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is an introvert who’s learned to embrace his true self later in life. After 20 years in advertising and marketing leadership, including running agencies and managing Fortune 500 accounts, Keith now channels his experience into helping fellow introverts understand their strengths and build fulfilling careers. As an INTJ, he brings analytical depth and authentic perspective to every article, drawing from both professional expertise and personal growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dr. Eli Somer and what did he discover?

Dr. Eli Somer is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Haifa in Israel. In 2002, he published the foundational research identifying and naming maladaptive daydreaming, describing it as extensive fantasy activity that replaces real-world engagement and interferes with daily functioning. His work gave language to an experience that millions of people had lived with privately but never had clinical vocabulary to describe.

What is maladaptive daydreaming?

Maladaptive daydreaming involves vivid, absorbing, plot-driven fantasy that becomes so time-consuming and compelling that it interferes with real life, relationships, and work. Unlike ordinary daydreaming, it can last for hours, often involves recurring characters and elaborate narratives, and frequently includes compulsive qualities where the person struggles to stop even when they want to. It is not currently listed as a formal diagnosis but is recognized in clinical and research contexts.

Are introverts and HSPs more likely to experience maladaptive daydreaming?

There is no definitive evidence that introversion or high sensitivity directly causes maladaptive daydreaming. Yet the traits associated with both, including a rich inner life, deep emotional processing, sensitivity to overstimulation, and a tendency to find the inner world more manageable than external environments, can make the pull toward absorbing fantasy particularly strong. When external life is overwhelming, painful, or socially exhausting, the inner world offers a form of relief that can become habitual over time.

How is maladaptive daydreaming different from healthy imagination or introvert reflection?

The core distinction lies in function and agency. Healthy imagination and introvert reflection tend to enrich engagement with real life, generating ideas, processing emotions, and restoring energy. Maladaptive daydreaming substitutes for real life rather than enriching it, and the person often feels unable to choose when to stop. If the inner world is making real relationships, work, and daily responsibilities harder to sustain, and if the daydreaming feels compulsive rather than chosen, those are signals worth taking seriously.

What approaches help with maladaptive daydreaming?

Because maladaptive daydreaming lacks a standardized treatment protocol, approaches vary. Cognitive behavioral therapy focused on identifying triggers and functions, mindfulness practices that build present-moment tolerance, and trauma-informed work addressing underlying pain have all been used with some success. Somer’s clinical approach emphasizes restoring choice over the inner world rather than eliminating imagination. Self-compassion is also a significant factor, since shame and self-criticism tend to increase avoidant behaviors rather than reduce them. Working with a therapist familiar with dissociation and trauma is often the most effective starting point.