What is a Fantasy Prone Personality and could you be one of them?
It is one of the established facts that an average person might spend 10% of his waking life daydreaming about something, and it is not necessarily bad, daydreaming or fantasizing may actually be a great escape to every day life. It is actually proved to be beneficial, it your self induced happy sport, a world you can happily get lost to. In a way, you are actually exercising your creative and imaginative capabilities.
But there is a minority group of people who may actually spend half, or most of their waking life daydreaming, fantasizing, living somewhere else, living inside of their mind, and probably as someone else. This particular group of people constitutes 4% of the population around the globe, their imaginative skills are so strong, they even claim to experience vivid sensations as they fantasize recklessly through the day. What we are talking about here is a dispositional personality trait in which, a person is intensely involved in their imaginary world.
American psychologists Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber first identified Fantasy prone personality (FPP) in 1981. They interviewed 27 highly hypnotizable women, and found that 26 of them shared a series of traits, or characteristics, which we are labelling to as FPP. They enlisted certain traits which encircled to fantasy proneness, which were:
1.Exellent hypnotic subjects
2.Seeing classical hypnogogic imagery (monsters, spirits etc)
3.Having imaginary playmates
4.Experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams)
5.Adopting of a fantasy identity
6.Encountering apparitions
7.Fantasizing frequently as a child
8.Being involved in ‘healing’
9.Experiencing imagined sensations as real
10.Out of the body experiences
11.Having vivid sensory perceptions
12.Claiming to possess psychic powers
13.Reliving past experiences
These were the certain traits they shortlisted as possessed by Fantasy Prone Personalities, most of them are so much involved in their fantasy world that it becomes difficult sometimes to differentiate between dream and reality, they often claim to experiencing vivid sensations relating to their fantasy world, out of the body experiences and a tendency to mix fantasies with real memories. This group of FPP’s are also susceptible to hypnosis, they make excellent hypnotic subjects.
Now, further studies showed that there can be numerous factors that contributed to formation of a fantasy prone personality. For instance,
A person in family who encourages reading fairytales and fantasizing, or treating the toys as something living. Other behaviours that might reinforce a child’s fantasies.
Children with physical/ sexual abuse, for them, fantasizing provides a coping mechanism, a happy and safe place to wander to, that is their minds. Abuse can result in people creating a fantasy world of happiness in order to fill the void.
Loneliness/ Isolation, people often use fantasizing to cope with their lonely environments, lonely people tend to make vigorous fantasizers, they claim to use fantasies as a way to escape the miserable reality, or the other way round, they may isolate themselves, or carve out their time especially to get lost into the dream world.
Sigmund Freud stated that ‘unsatisfied wishes are driving power behind fantasies, every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves an unsatisfactory reality.’
There can be various reasons about why and how a fantasy prone personality is created, maybe an interplay of both nature and nurture. Every dispositional fantasizer creates an escape, a way away, away from reality, in which, they tend to fulfill every unsatisfied wish of theirs, wish which may have been impossible and carve their way into a better and beautiful worlds. And that’s all…Please feel free to share how much time according to you, you spend into the alternate world of yours!
Happy daydreaming!
