Fantasy Fog
- Hannah Parkinson
- Mar 10
- 10 min read
When hope pretends to be intuition, and how learning nervous system safety brings you back to real life.
I’ve been thinking about the most addictive drug I have ever taken (and no, it was not alcohol, nicotine, micro-dosing mushrooms or any of the somewhat obvious things you can point to and call a problem). It was hope, and not even hope in the wholesome or grounded sense, but hope dressed up as intuition. Hope wearing a silk robe and calling itself “divine timing,” hope with a Spotify playlist and a storyline running my love life like a Netflix series I refused to cancel, even when the writing was objectively terrible.
The reason it is so addictive is because fantasy does not just feel good, it feels safe, and it gives your nervous system something to hold onto when reality feels too quiet, uncertain, or unromantic. It gives you a plan when you do not actually have one, a reason when you do not have the answers, and a future when someone is not really offering you one.
If you have ever found yourself playing out scenes in your mind like you are rehearsing for a role that might never even be cast, then you already know this isn’t “being delusional,” it’s your body bargaining for safety.
Fantasy fog isn’t at all romantic; it's just you bargaining with your own nervous system.
Why fantasy fog happens
For most of my life, fantasy has felt safer than reality. That doesn’t make logical sense, I know, but fantasy didn’t make me feel logically safe, it made me feel emotionally safe. Because subconsciously I was always projecting into a future where the man shows up, the business blows up, and everything finally clicks, and this gave my nervous system a little hit of control. I was addicted to the thought, “I’ll be okay… when,” and it sounds harmless until you realise what it quietly steals from you, which is your ability to live in your own actual life.
Fantasy gave me a role to play and a future version of myself to aim for, and if I’m honest, it helped me survive, because sitting fully in the present used to mean feeling grief, loneliness, and the ache of not being seen, chosen, or safe in myself yet. Fantasy softened that pain by giving me hope before my body knew how to feel safe now, and that is the part people don’t always understand, especially if they’ve never lived with a nervous system that thinks uncertainty = danger.
If you grew up learning that love is inconsistent, or that your needs are inconvenient, or that being “the good one” is how you stay safe, then fantasy can become a quiet coping strategy that looks like spirituality.
Sometimes “divine timing” is just avoidance wearing incense.
You tell yourself that you are just trusting the universe, that you are staying open, that you are being “led,” but really, you are just trying to regulate the dysregulation by living in a future that promises "relief".
The moment I realised I was scripting my own cage
The brutal part is that I didn’t even realise I was doing it at first, because fantasy fog doesn’t usually announce itself like, “Hi Hannah, I’m avoidance.” It tends to arrive dressed as something more socially acceptable, like motivation, hope, being open-minded, just trusting the universe, or being the kind of person who believes in possibility. And it can show up anywhere reality feels uncertain, which is exactly why it feels so compelling, because uncertainty is where the nervous system starts bargaining.
Sometimes it looks like business fantasy, where you keep visualising the month everything blows up, and you tell yourself you’re “calling it in,” but what you’re actually sometimes doing is using the future to avoid the discomfort of showing up today.
Sometimes it looks like money fantasy, where you keep waiting for the one payment, the one opportunity, the one lucky break that will finally allow you to relax, and meanwhile your body stays in a low-level state of bracing because calm still feels conditional.
Sometimes it looks like healing fantasy, where you keep promising yourself that once you’re “fully healed,” then you’ll start living, start dating, start creating, start being seen, as if your life is something you earn after you’ve completed enough inner work.
And sometimes it shows up most intensely in relationships, because love uncertainty can press directly on the parts of us that learned early on that connection equals safety. That’s where mine used to be loudest, and it’s also where I can see it most clearly now, because it’s such a specific flavour of self-abandonment.
If you need fantasy to feel okay, it isn’t guidance. It’s coping.
And when I look back over my life, especially the last five years or so, there were times I genuinely thought I was being open and in my head it sounded mature, spiritual, expansive, like I was letting life unfold without gripping it. But what I was actually doing was mentally rehearsing, replaying, scripting, running simulations, and I did it like it was research, as if imagining enough versions of the conversation would eventually land me on the one that made me feel safe.
I would replay the same possibilities over and over again: What if I bump into him? What if he finally says the thing I wanted him to say? What if it all makes sense in hindsight and I get my cosmic rom-com ending?
And the most embarrassing part is that I wasn’t even fantasising about him as he was. I was fantasising about a version of him that had healed his wounds, gone to therapy, stopped being emotionally constipated, and turned into the man I needed him to be in order to justify my hope.
I was staying energetically bonded to a version of reality that didn’t even exist, and the fog was so thick that it stopped me from seeing the one thing that mattered: what he was actually doing.
Not what he might do.
Not what he could do.
Not what his “higher self” would do.
What he was actually doing... Which, a lot of the time, was quite literally... nothing.
And the reason I’m sharing that is not because this is a “men are the worst” type of blog post, but because the mechanism is the same everywhere. Fantasy fog keeps you emotionally attached to potential so you don’t have to confront reality, and it keeps you busy rehearsing a future while your real life sits quietly in the background waiting for you to inhabit it.
Fantasy keeps you tethered, not to a person, but to an outcome.
Hope dressed up as devotion
And then there is this very particular kind of self-abandonment that looks like devotion, but it’s anything but. It’s when you keep the door cracked open because you don’t want to look “closed off,” but if you are honest, you are not being open, you are just being available.
Available for breadcrumbs, for closure that you’ll never get, and available for someone who gets to stay in your energy without actually choosing you.
This is the part that used to trap me, because I would tell myself I was being patient and evolved, and I would frame it as "healing", when really it was just me staying in the doorway of someone else’s decision, living as if the main event of my life was whether a person would appear and choose me, and turning every moment into a cosmic test of whether I had “passed.”
Then one day I realised I didn’t want that anymore. I didn’t want to hand my peace over to a storyline, I didn’t want to make my life a stage where the main event was someone else’s readiness, and I didn’t want to keep confusing longing with love.
And that was the moment it clicked... Fantasy fog isn’t love, it’s a loop.
The quiet decision that changed everything
This really wasn’t a cinematic moment, but that’s exactly why it mattered, because there was no crying on the floor (unlike me, I know), there wasn’t any ritual music or candles, and no big announcement to anyone but myself. It was just a quiet internal decision, the kind that changes your life precisely because no one sees it. It didn’t rely on adrenaline or emotion, it relied on truth, and the truth was that if fantasy fog was the thing keeping me trapped in a loop, then the only way out was to stop feeding it. The decision was simple, even if it didn’t feel easy at first.
So, I decided to stop rehearsing my life.
Not just with the romantic storylines, but with the whole mental habit of living in a future that promises relief from reality as it actually is today.
I stopped running mental simulations to soothe anxiety, and I stopped looping conversations that hadn’t happened yet just to get a temporary sense of control. I stopped building whole future scenes in my mind and calling it intuition, when really it was my nervous system bargaining with uncertainty. I stopped scanning for signs, not just signs about people, but signs about timing, signs about whether I was doing it right, and signs about whether I was allowed to relax yet.
I stopped feeding the storyline that my peace was waiting for me in the future.
And the weird part was that once the fog starts to lift, it honestly feels like withdrawal. You lose the dopamine hit of possibility, and you are left with the quiet of reality, which can feel like emptiness, boredom, grief, and that strange, restless discomfort that makes you want to run back to the fantasy just to feel something familiar again.
But this is the part where a lot of people panic, and why so many people go back to old loops, old situationships, old distractions, and old procrastination patterns, because your system is still learning that presence is safe.
What you’ve actually lost is just the addiction, and when that addiction breaks, your energy comes back online in the most understated, underwhelming way at first. You notice you have more space in your head, more room in your chest, and more quiet in your body.
Then one day you realise you are no longer living for the moment when life finally permits you to feel okay, because you have started giving yourself that permission now, and suddenly your life starts feeling like it's yours again.
Learning to breathe now, not when
Over Christmas, I went back to the UK to visit my family on a three-week break, and afterwards I realised something that, for me, was impossible to ignore. That, for the first time ever, I noticed that in the lead-up to that trip, I wasn’t clinging to a specific festive season outcome. I wasn’t scripting conversations, manufacturing Christmas magic, or planning organised fun to make it more “memorable.” I wasn’t trying to control how it would go, or even bracing for potential family drama, because something in me had softened into trust, and finally my nervous system had stopped gripping the steering wheel like it’s fighting for its life.
And the most beautiful part was that because I wasn’t clinging to the fantasy version of how a family Christmas “should” be, the trip actually ended up being more nourishing, more healing, and honestly more magical than I ever could have predicted, and not because I planned any of it, but because I didn’t micromanage it.
I didn’t manifest it by controlling every variable; I just received it by releasing control. And I just let life meet me, not with fantasy, but with presence.
What happens when you stop outsourcing safety to the future
When you are addicted to the fantasy, or you need a version of the future to play out precisely the way you imagine, you are often trying to manifest from lack, from “I’ll feel better when,” and you can feel it in the body because it’s tense, it's urgent, needy, and gripping. But when you already feel grounded, resourced, and safe, the right people, moments, and opportunities arrive cleanly and calmly, because you’re no longer trying to force reality to give you permission to exhale.
This is the part that changes everything, because when you stop using fantasy as a nervous system strategy, you stop chasing love from longing, you stop proving yourself in your work, you stop gripping for signs, and you root into what’s actually real.
You become available for your actual life, not the one you can imagine, but the one you can live, and that is where your power has always been.
How to tell if you’re in fantasy fog
If you want a simple check-in, here are a few signs you might be in fantasy fog, and to help bring you back to reality with compassion.
You might be in fantasy fog if you notice that you are:
mentally rehearsing scenes that would make you feel chosen
interpreting crumbs as “signs”
checking energy instead of checking behaviour
staying available to potential instead of reality
using “divine timing” to avoid making a decision
living for a future version of yourself instead of supporting the one you are now
None of this makes you silly (trust me). It makes you human, maybe a little tender, and it might mean that your nervous system has not yet fully learned that the present is safe enough to inhabit.
Reflections:
Where are you confusing “intuition” with hope, and calling it guidance?
What story are you rehearsing that keeps you emotionally attached to potential (a person, a timeline, a goal) instead of what’s actually happening?
If you stopped scripting the moment everything finally clicks, or they finally show up, what would you do with your real life this week?
What would it look like to let the present be safe enough, even before it’s perfect?
Want extra support?
If this resonated and you can feel you’re done outsourcing safety to a future version of yourself, this is exactly the work I hold inside my 1:1 Cord Cutting Ceremonies.
Cord-cutting isn’t just about cutting ties with people. It can also be about releasing fantasy timelines, coping identities, the “I’ll be okay when” illusion, and the emotional loops that keep you hooked on potential over presence. It’s a ceremony, yes, and it’s also a grounded reset that brings you back to now.
If you’re ready to make peace with the present and let go of the version of you who needed fantasy to feel safe, I’d love to hold space for you.
Or, book a Breakthrough Session instead...
If you want clarity first, we’ll identify where fantasy fog is keeping you stuck, what your nervous system is protecting you from, and what needs to shift so you can feel safe in the present again.
A quick note from me…
Hello,
I’m Hannah, a holistic empowerment coach and Reiki Master. I write about energy, healing, and the real-life stuff that comes with becoming the version of you who actually feels safe in her own body.
If you’d like support, you can explore my sessions and offerings below.
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