☀️ꙮ➶🌌🖤🦇🐝🌙💻👟🐺🌹🦀☘️📚🖋️🦋🎲🕊️

"...and we build a new world that even words can't describe."

Blurb: When a young boy visits his grandfather, their lack of a common language leads to confusion, frustration, and silence. But as they sit down to draw together, something magical happens--with a shared love of art and storytelling, the two form a bond that goes beyond words.

Why is it worth your time?: This is a beautiful realitymashing picture book about a grandfather and grandson finding ways to communicate by sharing art-making time together, with their artistic avatars battling a dragon with their drawing implements of choice. This is a rare communal realitymashing piece that ISN'T a horror story! Well worth checking out!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, realitymashing, family, fictioneers??? (for lack of a better term for one's artistic self-insert), visions

Content Warnings: None.

Access Notes: Available in paper book and ebook forms.

Misc Notes: This book has won a load of awards for good reason!

Submitted by matshushima! Thank you, matsushima!

"Others tried to tell me that she wasn’t real, that she was just imaginary.

But what did they know? She was real to me."

Blurb: What do you do when your imaginary friend goes away? Did you dream up the entire friendship? Maybe... But you miss her laugh, her comfort, and her silly mischief. It all feels so real... you couldn't have just imagined those things, right?

Why is it worth your time?: It's a cute picture book about imaginary friends with a fun twist at the end.

Plural/1+ Tags: imaginary friends

Content Warnings: N/A

Accessibility Notes: Picture book, available in print, digital, and audio

Submitted by matsushima! Thank you, matsushima!

Full title: Exploring the Aventine: An autoethnography on making sense of immersive daydreaming in the context of developmental trauma

"I summon my fantasy world characters and imagined others into dialogue and interaction. As we all converge at an intersection of immersive daydreaming and developmental trauma, ancestors whisper of intergenerational trauma and patriarchal psychiatric discourse."

Blurb: Immersive daydreaming is fantasy activity that is vivid, intricate and highly absorptive. Akin to an ongoing ‘movie-in-the-mind’, it often has the quality of feeling real and can continue over a period of months or years. The term ‘maladaptive’ daydreaming (MD) was introduced (Somer, 2002) to describe immersive daydreaming before researchers investigated it as a distinct psychiatric condition (e.g. Somer, Soffer-Dudek, Ross & Halpern, 2017) related to developmental trauma.

This thesis presents an autoethnographic journey into the Aventine, a term I use to refer to an elusive, liminal space. I ask readers to adopt and experiment with various lenses I use in my attempts to navigate immersive daydreaming from a critical, post-qualitative perspective. … The pathologization of creative responses to trauma is then countered to reveal fantasy as a site of liberation.

This creative-relational research is situated, experience-near and dialogical. Attending to the social/political, I challenge traditional forms of trauma-related fantasy representation and claim a space where the intuitive, imaginative and numinous are welcomed into therapeutic practice and scholarship. This thesis highlights the importance of process-driven research: from intrapsychic wars to synchronicities , and ultimately to a sense of homeness, I invite you as reader to accompany me on what became a reclamation of artistic and spiritual freedom.

Why is it worth your time?: It is a PhD dissertation on immersive daydreaming that includes transcripts of extensive inner dialogues between the researcher and real and imagined others from the researcher's life and immersive daydreaming story that spanned over a decade as well as real world historical figures.

Plural/1+ Tags: creator speaks from experience, people: copies, type: setting specific

Content Warnings: racist intergenerational trauma

Accessibility Notes: Full text PDF available on the University of West England (UWE) Bristol Research Repository