My sleeping imagination provides a bizarre contrast to my waking one. In effort to cope with my condition, I frequently daydream of a world where suffering has been minimized to a point of being acute and temporary, and ultimately remedied upon detection. To make this fantasy believable, almost tantamount to a humanist religion, I envisage this alternate reality to be one where the world has been united under a single polity where science and effective altruistic morality pragmatically work in unison to achieve this utopia.

I have been clinically diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder (SPD) since becoming an adult. A common misconception others have about this personality disorder is that it is psychotic or just a synonym for schizophrenia. It is neither. People with SPD from my knowledge and personal experience (I am not a medical professional) do not usually experience symptoms of psychosis. The DSM-5 considers SPD as a "pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings".

​While I do regularly experience vivid and horrifying nightmares — name pun intended — I have no memory of any hallucinations, save for minor auditory ones heard during a single episode of acute sleep deprivation during one really hot summer. If you're curious... I simply thought I heard my name being called among background noise. This occurred many years ago and I have never experienced any hallucinations again — and I question if that moment was actually a brief lapse in consciousness rather than an actual waking hallucination.

Anyway, suffice it to say... Equating the term "schizoid" with "schizophrenia" is inappropriate, albeit forgivable. Had I never been diagnosed or heard of SPD in the first place, I would probably hold that same misconception.

Excuse the click-baitey title, and obviously I'm not actually trying to encourage malicious webmaster practices. This journal entry is mainly just testing if this blogging feature works on my site. Testing, testing, 1 2 3.