Well, I’ve started to create some kind of alternate world where it’s just me, my mom, and a cool older sister called Alex and we travel the world together and have a British tutor/nanny person who comes with us and for some reason, we always make sure to buy a new property for every new place we go. I guess in that world money is infinite…I don’t know why…
I feel kinda bad about it, but my mom fantasizes about the same stuff, so I don’t feel like a complete dick…
I feel safer in that world.
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I imagine that’s how a lot of writers get their start. Creating fantasies is a coping strategy, and is quite common. It only becomes a problem if you lose touch with reality. If you’ve ever read a suspenseful novel and found your heart racing, it becomes easy to realize that there is a level of mind that doesn’t bother to make a distinction between what a person is thinking about or reading about and what’s really happening. Therefore, fantasies or what some would call visualizations, can really affect us emotionally, even when we know that those imaginings are not part of our external reality.
One of my favorite fantasies is living in a one room grass hut, halfway up the side of a valley, in a tropical forest. The valley opens onto a grassy plain, then beyond that a sandy shore and the ocean.
Anyway, thoughts that help you feel calm and safe should be enjoyed as often as possible
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Hey @Scarlette_Elle,
Your imagination can be a precious tool to use, as long as you don’t lose touch with reality either, even when it’s painful. A couple of months ago I was still seeing a therapist who uses hypnosis as a way to work on old traumas. It was all based on real memories and my capacity to imagine/create whatever I wanted to do in those memories (not gonna lie, I often had lots of superpowers during those sessions, lol). Being able to approach situations when I wasn’t safe or in control, yet this time having the power to do everything my imagination allowed, was really therapeutic. On a different note, it also helps me to have an imaginary “safe place” where I can go anytime I need.
Those are different ways than yours to use our imagination in order to cope with painful situations sometimes, but all of them are okay. Our imagination is an under-estimated tool. As much as it can stress us because we’d imagine the worst of an incoming situation, we can also learn to be more at peace by filling our heart with better scenarios. It doesn’t solve everything, it doesn’t heal everything, but like any coping mechanism sometimes it’s just what we need in order to keep moving on. 
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@Scarlette_Elle
As a way to shut myself off from ‘my life’, which was really difficult because of all kinds of dysfunction and abuse, I would … imagine myself in other ‘lives’. This became my way to cope, but I got a little too good at taking myself out of the real world, and into my ‘imagined’ worlds.
Otherwise, as a kid it helped me to remove myself from situations I couldn’t get away from, but as an adult, instead of coping with my problems, I disassociated, or imagined myself into a ‘better’ place. I actually knew no other way to respond to stress or problems.
Imagination is one of the best gifts humans possess, but it’s very important to stay present in your own life. Mine is a pretty extreme example, but by disassociating, I kept myself in really bad situations because I had this whole interior life that did not exist.
So this is cautionary, use your imagination, don’t live there. Peace 
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