Special Topic

My dad often calls me a "Space Cadet".  This of course refers to the long periods of time I spend staring into space while my mind is somewhere different than the rest of my body.  At school, lots of people ask me if I am sad, or upset. They see that I am staring off into the distance with a melancholy look on my face and they think something is wrong.  While this is understandable, it is not true.  I am simply lost in my mind.  I daydream all the time, probably once per class at school. I don't zone out because I don't care about the class, my mind simply wraps itself around a new topic and I forget about everything else.  This is something I have done for years and I have always wondered why I do it.  I chose this as my special topic because I want to find an understanding for why I get so lost in thought and how to avoid it at times when I need to be focused.

I believe that when I zone out it is to a degree that is worse than most people.  For example, one night I was playing Xbox and started thinking about something.  All of a sudden, I was just sitting in the dark.  I felt like I had actually been asleep.  While I was daydreaming I had actually turned off my Xbox and T.V. and then sat there for a while without even realizing what I was doing.  It was the weirdest thing ever and was hard to explain to the people I had just been playing Xbox with.  The worst time that being trapped in my mind affects me is at night.  I'll be almost asleep and then something will enter my mind.  Then it's a good 2 or 3 hours of sitting up or pacing around the room contemplating this thought until I am able to sleep.  Needless to say this really sucks when I have to wake up early for school the next day.. thank God for late start days.

I do not know much about why I seem to get stuck in my thoughts so severely, other than it seems to be worse than the average person.  Another interesting idea is that, even though he criticizes me for it, my dad does the same thing.  My dad has been known to fall into these long periods of intense thought in the shower.  Many times my mom has to tell him to get out when he loses track of time and takes very long showers.  I don't think that I inherited this from him, but it's an interesting thought.  It doesn't seem like something that could be inherited.

I do my best to stay busy so that this problem doesn't affect me as much.  Sometimes it comes about in a really bad time such as when I am taking a test or trying to focus in class. Now that I am actually focussing on it, hopefully I can find patterns and reasons to explain why my mind does what it does.