Fantasizing is Dangerous For Bipolar People

The greatest thing about bipolar is your brain. It’s wired in a unique way.

Your thoughts move fast. They race.

Your ideas form with mighty speed. Words come together fluidly.

But the danger in all of that is the imagination of a bipolar brain. If I’m not careful, my ideas can run away from me.

That’s why fantasies are dangerous.

A normal person may daydream and fantasize. For those of us diagnosed with bipolar, we find connections between random events and sequences, giving importance to seemingly innocuous events.

This is partly because bipolar people experience ideas of reference. This forms part of the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder. It’s basically when link together a series of random nothings and turn them into a cosmic “something”.

Now, why are fantasies bad?

For the average person, a fantasy is just that — a fantasy. For someone with bipolar, a fantasy may start off as a fantasy but could soon take on the form of a delusion. The fantasy can take on a life of its own and even control us, our actions, and our reactions.

It can make us do some really stupid things, because our reality becomes distorted and we begin to believe things that aren’t necessarily true.

There’s a fine line for us between what is real and what isn’t. In a normal state of mind, we can fantasize and joke. We can see the absurdity in our imaginations. But put us in a moment of stress and our paradigm shifts.

The untrue becomes true. The paranoia becomes real. Suddenly, the thing we covet so dearly becomes part of our reality and ceases to be figmentary.

We tell ourselves we believe in possibility. That we are open minded to opportunities and to change.

We go further than that, believing in coincidences that are unseen — except by us. We are the only ones who are in the know, we tell ourselves. That song on the radio — it’s playing because it’s a cosmic sign that the fantasy we hold is real.

Everything is a cosmic sign.

Things that aren’t meant to be suddenly are. Because the universe wants them to happen for us, we tell ourselves. Because we’re somehow special.

It’s easy for a bipolar person to get lost in a fantasy. And it’s really hard for us to snap out of that fantasy and back into reality.