Musings...............articles

Daydream Believers
by Steven Jay Lynn and Judith W. Rhue

Carla's parents were downstairs discussing her college prospects. Carla was upstairs playing with her dolls, Barb, Kathy and Becky. As the scenario unfolded, Barb argued that Carla, a straight-A student, would be stupid to spurn the generous scholarship offered by the school of her choice. Kathy argued that Carla should capitalize on her musical talents and join a rock band before committing herself to years of grueling education. Becky finally struck a hard-won compromise: Carla would go to college and join a campus rock band. Carla thanked her dolls, gently placed them in a box, locked it and went downstairs to tell her parents that after careful deliberation she had decided to accept the scholarship.

Carla is one of the so-called "fantasy addicts" we studied as part of a recent investigation of the fantasy-prone personality. This line of research goes back at least 20 years to Josephine Hilard's pioneering study at Stanford University, which found that people who are highly hypnotizable are more likely than other to have a rich fantasy life. More recently, psychologists Sheryl Wilson and Theodore X. Barber of Cushing Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, confirmed the links between hypnotizability and fantasy proneness and concluded that these people have a unique set of personality traits and life experiences.

Carla fits the profile outlined by Wilson and Barber. She has a long history of intense imaginative involvement in reading, play and mystical or religious experiences dating back to early childhood. She claims that she experiences physical reactions such as nausea and anxiety to violence on television and in movies, that her fantasies are so vivid that she can, for example, experience an orgasm wihout touching herself, that she enjoys spending as much as half her free time engaged in fantasy and that she occasionally has psychic and out-of-body experiences. Additionally, Carla is a hypnotic virtuoso, one of those rare individuals who can respond to almost any hypnotic suggestion, even those that involve profound alterations in subjective experience. Despite this rather out-of-the-ordinary background, Carla impressed us as a well-adjusted college student. She had reconciled her career objectives and was excelling in academics as well as performing in a popular campus band.

Unlike earlier research, which started with people who differed in hypnotic responsiveness, we first identified people who differed in fantasy proneness. Using a brief questionnaire, we identified 23 fantasizers from a pool of more than 1,400 college students. Twenty-one medium and 18 low-fantasy-prone students were identified as comparison groups. We rated these people on their susceptibility to hypnosis, administered a number of personality tests and interviewed them about their childhood experiences.

As expected, fantasizers were highly responsive to hypnotic procedures. Nearly 80 percent of them scored in the "high susceptible range," accepting at least 9 of 12 hypnotic suggestions. The fantasizers did not differ from the others in terms of grade point average, but they did outscore their less imaginative counterparts on measures of fantasy, imagination and creativity. On these and virtually all of the other measures we used, the medium and low fantasizers were indistinguishable, suggesting that fantasy-prone people do represent a unique group.

One of the primary goals of our research was to trace the development of fantasy proneness. And what we found supports the commonly held belief that highly imaginative children are lonely and cultivate a rich fantasy life to compensate for a lack of stimulation. In other words, some childrean escape into a fantasy life as a way of coping with a less than perfect world. The fantasizers in our study reported feeling lonelier than the low-fantasy people did, and said they preferred imaginary games to playing with friends.

Our findings regarding physical punishment also highlight the coping functions of fantasy. Six of the fantasizers but none of the other students reported being severly abused as children, and reported using their imagination to block the physical and emotional pain of punishment. And it appears to have worked. Despite their reports of abuse, the fantasizers did not describe their home environments as any more negative than those of the other students.

Rorschach tests also suggested that an active imagination can serve as a safety valve. Fantasizers did not show any problem distinguishing fantasy from reality, but they did project more hostility onto the inkblots than the comparison groups did--not surprising, given their punitive home environments.

Not all of our fantasy-prone students, however, were victims of a harsh environment. More than a third of them had parents who did not use physical punishment. These parents encouraged imagination, sometimes to the point of sharing fantasies and shaping a mutual fantasy world. So it appears that imaginative tendencies can thrive in contrasting climates.

One final area of investigation involves the possibility that some fantasizers may be psychologically impaired. This does not appear to be the case. We are currently studying fantasy proneness in children, and on the basis of our ongoing research our impression is that neither an active imagination nor an addition to fantasy is related to psychological problems.

Steven Jay Lynn is a psychologist at Ohio University. Judith W. Rhue is a psychologist at the University of Toledo.

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