The Narcissist’s Parallel Reality: Fantasies That Look Like Truth

Yes.

All narcissists live a life of lie.

But it’s not as simple as that, because they don’t truly know what is a lie.

Instead of lies, falsehood is the more applicable word. A lie is something you know is a lie. A falsehood is a conviction you absolutely believe is true, but is untrue. So it’s complex, but ultimately understandable.

It would be more accurate to declare that narcissists live a life of lie because they believe the falsehood, because they spent a lifetime having no interest in truth or reality.

Now, on to the nature of fantasies.

We need to understand the nature of narcissist fantasies, or we will miss the mark, which will result in poor predictive powers.

The nature of a narcissist’s fantasy doesn’t come in the form of high fantasy, like mania. They don’t believe they are Jesus Christ or Napoleon. They don’t live in a Lord of The Rings setting. Just don’t think of fantasy in the way we’ve been conditioned to think of it, in a fantastic way, with superpowers or awesome epicness. In general, narcissists don’t hallucinate.

Also, narcissists are not preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited power and success. The fantasies of narcissists don’t tend to be grand. Grandeur is a red herring and throws us off. Most narcissists are not obsessed with grandeur. Look only for grandeur and you will miss 100% of the covert narcissists.

The fantasies of narcissists quite obviously don’t resemble the stuff of movies or novels. Anyone hallucinating stands out and is easily identifiable.

The fantasies narcissists live in resemble the real world. I would say that they are 98% like the real world. And that’s what’s so insidious about it. It’s almost indistinguishable from the real world. It’s absolutely indistinguishable to the narcissist.

If someone believes they are Napoleon, there would be a world of evidence to prove that they aren’t. It’s very hard to cling onto that fantasy. But if someone believes they are smarter than everyone else in the room, it wouldn’t be hard to maintain that fantasy and actually mistake that for reality for the rest of their lives. It’s what the Dunning-Kruger effect is all about.

So the nature of a narcissist’s fantasy is pervasive and insidious. It is virtually indistinguishable from reality. And therefore impossible to root out. Also impossible to point out convincingly. It’s even worse when they act like they are smart and everyone else buys into it, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Narcissists don’t fantasize in comic con costumes. They fantasize about daily reality.

And because of that, they live in a twisted, parallel daily reality.

In effect, they ‘live’ in the same reality as you, but in a parallel way. They inhabit a parallel reality with the same people in it, the same furniture, the same office, except for one difference, all their perceptions, all their interpretations, all their models of people and systems run on anti-reason falsehood. But that’s not easily obvious to either them or you. In fact, it’s not obvious at all, or you would have identified your narcissist 20 years earlier. As well, narcissists would then all be self-aware of their falsehoods.

Think of it like a romance movie. It’s more real and plausible than The Avengers. Both equally run on untruths. You would never buy into anything portrayed in The Avengers to describe life. But romance movies strive to be as real as possible. No superpowers, no expensive sets, no suspension of disbelief, nevertheless, all undercover lies. Romance movies are extremely good analogies for the nature of a narcissist’s fantasies.

It has been said that romance movies have ruined many relationships and marriages. And it’s true. But that can only happen when people mistake the things they see in romance movies as absolutely plausible, and realistically achievable. They’re not. But they didn’t know this, so they mirror their lives on romance movies, and squeeze their spouse and reality into the twisted, perverse script of a romance movie (many of these scripts may have been written by Weinstein types — just imagine how perverse the minds that wrote them might be, and what a prank on the world their movies became).

Romance movies are as fantastic as The Avengers. The way romance movies end is as plausible as Thor, son of Odin, Asgardian, Norse god, god of thunder. Anyone can see the implausibility of Thor. But fewer can see through the implausibility of romance movies. And that’s where the real harm is done. When people strive to replicate the ‘lessons’ they’ve ‘learnt’ in romance movies. When they failed to perceive the fantasy and untruth of romance movies. When they think it is life, just because there is no CGI in it.

‘Learning’ ‘lessons’ from romance movies is a good analogy of the devastating effect narcissist fantasies have on their life choices, and on what they expect from you. They live in a parallel reality that absolutely, utterly resembles ours. A reality which, just like Friends or Seinfeld, looks absolutely real, but is absolutely fake. And when they strive to apply the ‘rules’ from romance movies, or Seinfeld to real life, you will naturally get the twisted misperceptions, twisted misinterpretations, tantrums, forced scripting of outcomes, and twisted control freak behavior typical of the narcissist. It also prevents them from accepting truths about reality or perceptions. It goes both ways. Delusion fantasies and reality have parallel sets of rules which ultimately disagree and cannot converge. That’s why narcissists cannot form paradigms. It’s because they don’t live in reality.

And the most insidious part of it all is that you cannot convince the narcissist that they are living in delusion-fantasy, or that their fantasies are unreal, because they are as convinced as you are that they live in reality. Unlike Thor, there isn’t as much raw material to use to argue that Friends is unrealistic, metaphorically speaking.

Even worse, these lifetime delusion-fantasies slip under the radar. Narcissists don’t examine themselves or self-reflect, so they are not very explicit creatures. This means they are unaware of the existence of their own delusion-fantasies, and you are unaware that they are not living in the real world. Both of you are unaware of the narcissist’s delusion-fantasy mindset or its twisted ‘reality’ rules. It’s like secret malware hiding in the hard disk. The computer isn’t aware that it is compromised.

Think The Truman Show.

I want to clarify that romance movies are only an analogy.

Romance movies are not what’s wrong with narcissists.

What’s wrong with narcissists is much worse than romance movies.

Narcissists started ‘living in movies’ long before they watched their first romance movie, so it’s not really about romance movies, or romance.

Even as young children, while everybody else was somewhat busily living in reality (we live in reality more and more as we age), the narcissist child was fully living in a movie, their movie. And it either stayed this way or got even worse with age.

That movie parallels reality, so it is indistinguishable from reality. Except that it replaces reality and has subtly different rules, which is what produces these things commonly observed in narcissists

twisted perceptions

twisted interpretations

twisted understandings

twisted desires

twisted needs

twisted logic

twisted reasoning

twisted expectations

indifference to real logic

indifference to reason and being reasonable during difficult situations

indifference to the emotions of others

obsessed with their own emotions

blind to Theory of Mind, treating everyone else as if they have no real thoughts or emotions or intent

everything purely in their own terms

MeNow (always the star of their own movie)

everyone else is an extra, the environment is a stage prop

being pathologically convinced of things nobody can unconvinced them of, stuck with bloody minded blind faith in their convictions and reasoning, most of which are pathological when examined under the harsh light of reality and sanity

forgone conclusion as a way of thinking, a preference for conspiracy theory type thinking rather than evidence and logic

no paradigms and no paradigm shift

arrested development

self-fulfilling prophecy from treating people and situations with stubborn convictions against all evidence

in the place of humbly considering evidence, they have disregardance, discardance, anti-reason, unreasonability, senselessness, marching to an invisible but perverse drumbeat, anti-commonsense, and the continuing injury their falsehoods do to truth and relationships

doublethink, the senseless acceptance of irresolvable contradictions that bypasses cognitive dissonance through never processing cognitive dissonances

no curiosity about truth or reality

no respect for evidence

no interest in other people’s arguments, reasoning, or life experiences

no paradigms that attempt to predict reality

locked in from the inside syndrome, shut out the outside world

hatred of complexity or subtlety or the intricacies of reality

hatred of having to pay attention to others when they are talking (to the narcissist, being forced to pay attention to others is like sitting through the entire commercial break in movies)

the destruction of everything (self-destruction, destruction of relationships, destruction of others welfare) through following unreasoning rules that seem to make perfect sense to only themselves

an unquestioning belief or conviction in explanations for things that are senseless and keep producing very poor predictive or explanatory results, but will never get abandoned due to 0% self-reflection

The narcissist is functionally psychotic and cannot be reasoned with because they are living a movie script and you are a nameless extra filling a role, jabbering nonsensically at them, making conversation for the sake of the scene. They don’t have to pay any attention to you. You’re not really conversing. They are not processing what you said. You don’t really exist. This is all not really real.

No.

In the same way that the seemingly harmless romance movies subtly ruin the lives of people who didn’t know any better not to take them seriously, all

falsehoods

fantasies mistaken for reality

delusions

dissociation from reality

compartmentalization

fragmentation

psychosis

ultimately point in the same direction, towards non-accountability.

Hence all falsehoods and delusions are ultimately toxic. Because non-accountability is injurious. People get hurt through that. And non-accountable people refuse to cut it out. Because their twistedness shields their perceptions from their own non-accountability (moral revisionism).

Magical thinking itself is already not a good thing, but when you get moral magical thinking, it’s undeniably perverse and ruin-seeking.

In fact, extreme non-accountability is indistinguishable from insanity (spiritual worthlessness) because it is ruin-seeking at its finest.