Sex and Escapism: Daydreaming and Fantasy

Hyper is an expedition into sexual healing. This is my interrogation of the spiritual violence and conditioning imposed by religious dogma, capitalism, casteism and white supremacy. With Hyper, I bring forth my own sexual wounds in an attempt to push back on the structures that conspire to prevent divine feminine evolution according to the individualistic and self serving toxic masculine missions of colonization and imperialism. Dismantling the status quo requires not only an interrogation of the institutions we occupy, but also a naming of the multitude of ways in which the body has been colonized. 

For those of you actively looking for a way to heal sexual wounds, to experience sexuality fully, this space is for you. Together, horizontally, we have the power to both heal and transcend ancestral and inherited sexual trauma, coming into our divine purpose to undo the conditioning of the cistem that has attempted to dampen the radical agency we have swimming deep within us.

prinita thevarajah, July 2020

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I started maladaptive daydreaming when I was five, to distract myself from the daily sexual abuse I was experiencing. A whole new world that was safe and secure was forged in my mind as a coping mechanism, to survive my everyday reality. As a child, I would allocate time to establish imaginary situations and scenarios that I would spend minutes to hours dwelling in the comfort of my bed, the backseat of a moving car, in the middle of an unengaging classroom. They often included unreal friends, architecturally and interiorly tasteful homes, a celebrity partner, lavish clothes and other luxuries I was not afforded. Hyper sexual, many of these daydreams evolved to include sexual fantasies that I deemed ‘healthy.’ Having sex in my mind instead of my body added to the dissociative relationship I had to my sexuality and my vessel itself. Conditioned, I did my best to fit these daydreams into the confines of the conservative Thamil Christian upbringing I was raised in. My partner was always a man who was welcomed by my migrant community, I was always surrounded by an imagined Christian community. 

According to a 2018 study maladaptive dreaming involves dissociative and OCD like symptoms, it’s inhabitants are prone to addiction. The study suggests that women are more affected by the condition, and all who experience it also struggle with anxiety or depression. Childhood abuse and the experience of severe neglect and loneliness is one of it’s key developmental pathways. Where Freud once stated that “unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies, every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves an unsatisfactory reality,” daydreaming allowed me to fill the void that accompanied my abusive and emotionally isolating childhood. 

Creating another world not only rescued me from pain, but also allowed me to romanticize my current life, contributing to my ability to present as unharmed when I moved through my day to day. One evening after a parent-teacher interview, I overheard my father expressing concern to my mother after he had flipped through my classroom journal. “A lot of her entries are made up” he disclosed, troubled, to which my mother responded that I "just have a very active imagination.” At eight, my journals pages were filled with impressive fiction: me swinging through jungle tree houses with my siblings, weekends spent laid out on pristine sands with my parents, indulging in decadent meals with make believe friends. Israeli psychologists Hisham Abu-Rayya and Reut Brenner conducted a 2020 study on childhood trauma and maladaptive daydreamers stating childhood exposure to physical and emotional abuse is “associated with an increased likelihood of daydreaming about an idealized version of original families.” Not only did daydreaming allow me to protect myself, it also functioned as a way to safeguard the truth about my wounded family.

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Years of dreaming as a child and teenager led to the manifestation of an ideal yet superficial adulthood. Where manifestation is the materialization of a dream through the power of attraction, my ardent childhood spirituality and (perhaps toxic) positivity eventually brought me all that I had once wished for. I became sexually active and eventually partnered in my early twenties. Casual sex became a tangible route through escapism. The power I felt in being desired yet unable to fully complete the action due to my vaginismus stimulated me as I felt in control and yet somewhat untainted. Now I understand the stagnancy accommodated with vaginismus as the lodging of emotional, spiritual and physical trauma. Though before I was awake, it was utilized as both a weapon and a strong hold. Some of my dreams now tangible, I was with a beautiful someone who ticked all my then necessary boxes and led a voluptuous lifestyle full of cocaine and caviar, but beneath the surface, I was still morbidly depressed. Turning up to mandatory church services hung over, in constant conflict with my family, not yet confronting my years of abuse. There is an awkward stickiness in moving through rising trauma that one attempts to squash. My own woundings were often uncomfortably projected onto others. I was manic and unable to see myself fully as I remained in triggering situations. It was what made my parents wonder why I could “have it all and yet be so sad all the time.” I recently had a conversation with artist Annika Hansteen-Izora on the notion of communal dreaming. In it, we discussed how the colonial white imagination only allows for dreaming that stays within a structure that maintains the status quo. My conditioning meant the years of maladaptive daydreaming I moved through did not fully free me from the burdens of my trauma, but instead, allowed me to place a salve on top of them. As it became palpable, the stagnancy that accompanies a life within an oppressive system moved me to shake things up. 

In my early twenties, I began to daydream again. This time, instead of an abstract distant future, I dreamed of escaping to Brooklyn immediately. Every night, I’d lay in bed and imagined a life of art making. Despite being in a relationship, when I dreamed, I was alone. I danced on the top floor of a sun drenched brownstone, an easel before me, splashing paint across the room as I rolled around in my autonomy. I do not know why I chose New York City. I had never previously understood it’s culture fully, instead, something called me to it. Two years later, I was fully settled into my home in BedStuy, fully alone in an ecosystem that fulfilled me, making art, understanding my body and establishing my healing journey. During this time, my maladaptive tendency to daydream ceased. Even when I tried, I could not envision any other life for myself. I was finally present with my reality. A daily practice of mindfulness supported my impulse to fantasize and I was learning how to be grateful for the life I built for myself instead of hopeful for a life that did not exist. 

 **

I have been back in my childhood home in Sydney for over three weeks now and initially fell into and maintained a reliable, high functioning depression. I accepted that all the members of this household, including myself, are on board a highly unstable rollercoaster. When it fails to sustain a steady, spiritless pace, the rollercoaster jumps into erratic and exhausting turns, loops through nervousness, hangs upside down, terrified, and giddily roars a million miles per hour. It becomes safer to stay strapped into numbness. To not be is to be both paralyzed and upheaved by too much feeling, and that, when unmediated, is often incredibly unproductive. When excavated, we discover that there is too much hurt to hold. Hurt that was buried before me was swept aside but still lingers from after and within me. I choose not to wander into the dark corners of this house where the ghost of my child self lies, naked and alone. I don’t prod at the scraps of abandonment and remnants of neglect that remain haunting the minds of my parents. And I certainly don’t externalize any emotion other than happy, apathetic, or sad. There is no room for complexity and I choose not to risk complete vulnerability in such an agitated space. Completely juxtaposed to the home I built for myself in Brooklyn, I have recognized the numbing reality of my temporary stay. This is not to say that I am not engaged in conversation or find moments of content with my kin, it is just to paint the very complex and confusing picture that is often a traumatized family dynamic.

Within the first night of my stay, I became once again lost in my dreams. A new home for myself, a partner, the success of my glass studio were all ideas I immersed myself into. Noticing this pattern, I brought it up in therapy, worried that I was repeating a toxic cycle of manifesting to maintain a system that I had already opted out of. Why was it that I felt the only way out was with a partner? Why was I so quick to romanticize platonic relationships as a way out of a triggering situation? While the healed parts of me can understand this as loneliness, an amalgamation of my own internal wounds, and will try to prioritize self soothing and self care, it can be very hard to locate let alone prioritize one's own needs when you are in a volcanic space of emotions that is actively traumatizing. When in these patterns, the loneliness that surfaces to be closer to myself gets misinterpreted as a yearning for another: another home, another partner, another life. My incompleteness seeks a whole other reality rather than comfort within myself. My therapist, Priti, prompted me to identify the particular feelings that accompanied these daydreams: safety, security, stability. She encouraged me to not beat myself up for falling back into these patterns but instead, prioritize my yearning for these rightful states of being: to be safe, to be secure, to be stable. 

When I first heard the phrase “a radical imagination will set you free” at a protest in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum, I knew this was my life’s mantra. Though there was nothing radical about my daydreaming as a child or even my inclination to dream as I returned to my childhood home. Safety, security and stability are not radical ways of living. They are rightful, I deserve them. Instead of imagining what I deserve, I am learning to maintain boundaries and materialize, in the real world, the answer to these needs. It was a radical act for me, the abused child of poor refugees to make my way to New York City alone and unaccompanied where I set my mind, body and spirit free. That was only enabled by my ability to push myself to imagine a different future for myself, and then, slowly but surely, take the steps that allowed for its manifestation. I once lived in a fantasy world to protect myself, and through my healing journey, I am learning that it is ok to want more, to seek more and create more. I deserve whatever I radically imagine. 

**

Receiving news that I was returning home, my mother received a prophesy from the same preacher that claimed my life path was driving me towards a spiritual black out. This time, he came with a warning: that on my return, I would bring with me the evils of the world. A few months before I left New York, I had a chart reading with astrologer AliceSparklyKat. Alice shared that at an early age, I transited through a Pluto conjoined with my ascendant in Capricorn that only happens once in a lifetime and not to everyone. Who I am now is fundamentally different to who I was in the past. I bring the culmination of my traumas and my dreams, and my ability to set myself free with me. I will adamantly hold these truths that I have learned about myself and the world around me, in the face of any construct that attempts to confine me. Even as I’ve returned to my childhood home, I have not returned as a child with maladaptive tendencies, but a woman fully powerful and capable of materializing my own and communal destiny.