In her twenties, an American woman called Ruth, living in London, was afflicted by hostile hallucinations of her father who lived on the other side of the Atlantic at the time. These hallucinations affected her senses of sight, hearing, smell and touch as if her father had been physically present. Ruth thought she was going mad but, through the treatment of a wise psychiatrist, learned instead that her ability to fantasize was a gift she could and did use positively. She was unwittingly known as a fantasy prone personality and the late developer of a talent that some fortunate people, perhaps 3 or 4 percent of the population possess all their lives. Fantasy prone personalities, like Ruth, fantasize with ALL their senses

The abilities of fantasy prone people (FFP***) generally begin in childhood. Many of them, like many “sensitives” had childhood playmates as real flesh and blood companions, whom, they learned through sometimes bitter experience, adults could not see. Not only this, but they “became” characters from books they read, ceasing to be themselves in a way similar to that in which a great actor loses himself completely in the character he portrays Fantasies are not without danger, a child who believed she was leading a lamb through a meadow suddenly ‘awoke’ to find herself alone surrounded by traffic.

A consciously developed ability to fantasize can continue into adult life for various reasons. Adults significant to the child may encourage (enable) him through accepting his viewpoint and convincingly as their own. A child may use his fantasy world to escape from isolation, loneliness; a deprived or distressing environment or a particular activity that he dislikes that may be intensive. Realization that they are not like others in their fantasizing ability makes adult fantasy-prone people secretive about their talent. They share their secrets with no one, not even marital partners. Some of them find relief in fantasizing with strangers pretending to be characters other than themselves.

Fantasy prone people have psychic abilities above average. Like other psychics, fantasy prone people have vivid imaginations. They do not merely recall events but relive them with sights, smells, sounds, tactile impressions and emotions of the original experience. Many of them have a perfect auditory memory. Their recollections, like their fantasies, are similar to films, but, films that they not only watch but in which they play a part. Some fantasy prone people eliminate unpleasant memories through amnesia. However, they have tendency to confuse fantasy memories with memories of actual events. An example of this is sexual encounters.

Fantasy prone people live an outwardly normal life but many of them admit to spending more than half their lives in a fantasy existence. In social contacts they can fantasize about what is being discussed or described by their companions, or use fantasy to escape from boredom. They often react to stimuli – a mention of Egypt can transport them back to a pharaoh’s court or modern Alexandria. They can fly from routine into a holiday world, ‘a previous life’, a trip into the future, travel to other galaxies or a sexual experience with a fantasy lover who can give them greater orgasmic satisfaction than any human being. As with fantasy prone children, so with adults, there are dangers and inconveniences associated with fantasies. Physical symptoms, even eventual illness may result from these fantasies.

The existence of fantasy prone people is significant for psychical research. Study of their characteristics may throw light on mediums; it is possible that some spirit guides and communications are created by subconscious fantasizing. Their existence also challenges the nature of our perception of reality, which we assume communicates itself by stimulation of the senses in approximately the same way to everyone experiencing it. Each object affects the senses of the observers in the same fashion from the outside in, as it were. But perhaps the there is another inner reality that communicates itself from the inside out, and a proper understanding of this ‘mirror’ reality could revolutionize our concept of the nature of the world.

***'Fantasy-prone personality' (FPP) is an expression coined by psychologists Cheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber in a 1983 paper based on a small study on hypnotic susceptibility. Their work developed a theme put forth by Josephine R. Hilgard, , a pioneer in the study of hypnosis. Wilson and Barber interviewed 27 highly hypnotizable women and found that 26 of them shared "a series of interrelated characteristics, a syndrome or personality type that we are labeling as the fantasy-prone personality" (1983: p. 345). They compared the highly hypnotizable women to 25 "volunteers from the women students of a nearby college" who were paid $10 to be "tested for imaginative ability." Only one of the students was both highly hypnotizable and passed all the items on the Creative Imagination Scale, which is "a standardized instrument that measures equally well (1) responsiveness to guided imagining and (2) responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions of the type that emphasize the imagining-hallucinatory aspects of hypnosis" (p. 341). The 27 subjects, or fantasy-prone group, were not randomly selected, either. Two were in therapy with Wilson or Barber (for weight loss and phobia), five were "paraprofessional therapists" (some of whom practiced theraputic touch), five were participants in earlier studies on hypnosis by Wilson and Barber, and fifteen were selected from their hypnosis workshops.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter®-II (KTS®-II) is the most widely used personality instrument in the world. It is a powerful 70 question personality instrument that helps individuals discover their personality type. Take it here:

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Resources:

The Unexplained, Vol. 9, pages 1088-1091

http://www.skepdic.com/fantasyprone.html