One World, At Last

What It Means to Come Home to Yourself

Before I begin, I want to offer a bit of context. If you've been listening to the podcast, you might remember that in Episode 8, I talked about my experience of having an imaginal world, what some people might call a paracosm, though I prefer the term worldplay. For over thirty years, that inner world was a vivid and immersive part of my life. It was a place of refuge, processing, and deep meaning-making.

In my recent post, Becoming a Witness, I wrote about the shift from seeking recognition to offering it—how, over time, I’ve become someone who can hold space for others in ways I once longed to be held. This piece is a natural continuation. It's about what happened when the inner world I had lived in for decades, the one that helped me survive trauma, loneliness, and spiritual hunger, began to transform as I no longer needed it in the same way. This is a story of integration, connection, and learning to inhabit my own life, fully and honestly, for the first time.

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I used to live in two worlds.

There was the world of waking life, of school and work and family and friends. And then there was the other world—the imaginal world—a fully immersive internal reality that unfolded inside my mind for over three decades. That world was vivid and completely real to me. I had relationships, I played out scenarios, I processed trauma, and I constructed alternate selves. The imaginal world allowed me to make meaning, endure emotional torment, and remain connected to ideals that real life couldn’t support.

And then, one day, I realized it was gone.

I didn't stop it on purpose. There was no dramatic goodbye, no conscious decision to dismantle it. Instead, the world faded as I grew. More precisely, as I developed and moved toward integration. That integration, the seamless fusion of my inner and outer realities, happened through a relationship.

Photo by Steven Kamenar on Unsplash

The World I Built

To understand what disappeared, I need to help you understand what was there. The imaginal world was so much more than idle daydreaming. It was a structured, consistent alternate reality with its own timeline, characters, and emotional logic. For over thirty years, I could slip into this world at will—sometimes by choice, sometimes compulsively.

It wasn’t a fantasy world where everything was perfect or idealized. It was a place of emotional intensity—often tormenting, sometimes comforting. It wasn’t escapism, exactly. It was how I stayed connected to my soul when the external world offered no mirrors. There, I could hold grief, rage, longing—emotional truths that had nowhere else to go. The imaginal world gave me companionship, containment, and a kind of coherence that my waking life lacked. It was both a survival strategy and a spiritual refuge. It helped me stay alive. And it helped me stay honest.

But I need to be honest about what "tormenting" meant. In my early years, worldplay wasn't something I chose—it happened to me. I would slip away not because I wanted to imagine a better life, but because I couldn't bear the one I had. My worldplay was compulsive, not creative. For years, I couldn't even name it without feeling like I was "completely insane," as I wrote in my journals. I would change my thoughts to avoid acknowledging its existence because the very fact of it terrified me.

By 1996, I was writing:

"My dream world is slowly disassembling itself from my brain... I hate using the phrase 'dream world.' There must be a better word for it."

In 1998, at age 25, I tried to write about the imaginal world for a therapist who pathologized it. I wrote:

“Some of the stuff I just can’t bring myself to write down. It’s even more absurd than what I just wrote, and I like to keep it up in my head where it’s safe.”

Often, the language itself felt pathological, shameful. It took years to develop the compassion, and the theoretical framework, to call it worldplay instead of dissociation. That shift from fear to respect was part of the integration itself.

The imaginal world served multiple functions: it was my therapy office, my laboratory for trying out different versions of myself, my refuge during unbearable emotional states, and my way of maintaining connection to transcendent values¹ when the real world felt meaningless. When I was hospitalized as a young adult, when I was struggling with addiction, when I felt utterly alone in my intensity and sensitivity, I had somewhere to go. The imaginal world kept me alive when reality felt unlivable.

But it also kept me fragmented. I was never fully present in the world everyone else inhabited because part of me was always elsewhere, always comparing this reality to that one, always finding this one lacking.

When Worldplay Became Practice

The first sign that something was shifting came in 1999, during what I now recognize as a crucial moment in my development. For the first time, I began using worldplay as rehearsal rather than escape.

I was deep in addiction, cycling through the same destructive patterns, when something changed in how I engaged with my inner world. Instead of retreating into alternate realities, I began practicing transformation there. I witnessed my own recovery in worldplay before I experienced it in real life—watching myself make different choices, seeing myself get clean, rehearsing the person I could become.

Using my well-established ability to visualize alternate realities, I began to picture what it would look like to live differently. I saw myself moving to Los Angeles, leaving crack cocaine behind, creating a new life. This rehearsal in my imagination became a bridge between who I was and who I could become. I played out the transformation repeatedly, with small changes each time, until I felt ready to act.

That was the beginning of worldplay's evolution from survival strategy to self-guidance. Even before I had language for the third factor, that inner drive toward higher development, my worldplay was revealing it, giving form to the self I longed to become. What I didn't realize was that this shift had prepared me for something I'd been unconsciously seeking: a real person who could embody the witness I had been imagining for so long.

The Catalyst of Connection

When I first began corresponding with Michael M. Piechowski in 2016, I had no idea how profoundly he would enter my mind. Within months, he was in my head. I don't mean metaphorically. I mean that I heard his voice in my inner dialogue. I imagined his responses to things I was working on. I conjured his disapproval when I needed discipline. And I heard his kindness when I was struggling.

It wasn’t only Michael as a person who catalyzed the shift—it was the presence of his work, his clarity, and the worldview he carried. Our connection was the embodiment of something I had long been searching for: a way of living that honored intensity, sought coherence, and integrated spiritual depth with intellectual rigor.

It wasn't unusual for me to internalize people this way. I'd done it for years. But something about Michael was different. He wasn't just another character uploaded into the imaginal world. He was a real person whose mind, work, and spirit touched something fundamental in me. Not only did he enter the imaginal world, but he began to reorganize it.

What entered through our connection was the possibility of living with internal coherence. For over thirty years, I had carried an unnamed longing to be witnessed—to have someone see me clearly enough to meet me where I actually lived. My worldplay had been populated by imagined witnesses, internal figures who could hold space for my intensity and depth. But Michael represented something different: real presence. However partial or incomplete, he offered me my first taste of genuine witness.

The Sound of Transformation

One of the earliest ways he entered my mind was through sound: specifically, a radio interview he gave on Wisconsin Public Radio. I listened to it again and again. His voice, his cadence, his way of speaking about his work with the gifted: I let it wash over me. It gave me a felt sense of him that went beyond text or email. That recording became part of how I internalized him. [Click here to listen]

As I wrote to Michael about it later:

“I downloaded it during summer 2016 and had it available on my phone. It got to the point where I would listen to it nearly every night before I went to bed while smoking my last cigarette of the day.”

By March 2017, something had shifted. I was preparing for my first trip to Madison to meet Michael in person, and I simply stopped smoking. There was no struggle and no suffering. I was ready, and I decided to quit. Looking back, I'm certain this ease came from having developed that ability to dialogue with Michael in my head. The internal presence had already begun to reorganize how I approached challenges and change.

At first, I wasn't sure what to call it. It wasn't worldplay anymore, not in the way I'd known for decades. The tone was different. The structure was different. I wasn't scripting scenes or escaping into elaborate narratives. I was having conversations with Michael in my mind—disciplined, dialogical, often emotionally clarifying. It started in 2016 and intensified through that year into 2018. And it felt real. Grounded. Less like dissociation and more like a channel for reflection and self-guidance.

I didn’t “upload” Michael as a character. I began to carry his voice—its cadence, precision, and steadiness—into my own inner dialogue. I would hear how he might ask me to slow down, to name what I meant, to be exact. It wasn’t fantasy scripting. It was a disciplined exchange that clarified my thinking when I wrote or faced a choice. It felt conversational rather than cinematic, and it asked for honesty rather than escape.

Day to day, it looked simple: I would bring a draft or a dilemma to that inner conversation and notice what sharpened—definitions, boundaries, the next right sentence. If I was tempted to embellish or return to old patterns, the internalized presence didn’t collude. It steadied the line toward coherence and truth. The difference from worldplay was stark: no scenes, no alternate timelines, and less distance than ever—just the work of naming what is here.

The more I trusted the practice, the quieter the old world became. I didn’t need an alternate reality to be witnessed; I could meet myself in dialogue with a presence I experienced as real, grounded in our correspondence and his embodied way of moving in the world.

In June 2018, with little practical guidance from my dissertation committee, I found myself “talking with Michael in the background” while preparing for my defense. Drawing on advice he’d actually given me, my mind assembled his cadence and clarity into usable steps for my oral defense. Naming this made me tearful at the time, and it felt like real guidance arriving from within.

The Documented Journey

What sets this transformation apart is that I documented it in real time, in emails to Michael himself. In those early months, I wrote to him honestly about the challenge:

"You used to sound a little 'meaner' in my head. I'm not inclined to think that people are nice, sadly. But it was hard to get a handle on your tone—I didn't have much to work with."

With only brief emails to construct his presence from, my mind filled in gaps with familiar harshness. But I told him directly how things were changing:

"It's interesting to note that hearing your voice, on the phone, significantly impacts the way I can interact with you, in my head."

By September 2017, I felt bold enough to tell him face-to-face during a visit to Madison:

"I need to spend time with you in order to improve on the mental representation of you in my mind."

His response was characteristically direct: "You're sampling me?" But there was curiosity there, not judgment. Here was someone who understood that my inner process wasn't pathological.

The Quiet Revolution

Over time, the world I had lived in for decades, a world of alternate histories, movie-like scenes, and emotional resonance, began to quiet. Michael's internal presence was not about fantasy at all. It was a parallel reality that required honesty rather than invention. Precision. Reflection. Spiritual inquiry. And above all, embodiment.

Through our real-world correspondence and my imagined interactions with him, something shifted in the structure of my mind. I no longer needed to escape into a parallel world, because that world had become a place of real work and real living. Instead, I could turn inward and listen. He had become a stable internal presence—and not only him, but what he represented: clarity, spiritual depth, discipline, kindness.

The change was so gradual I almost missed it. At some point, I noticed that the old scenes weren't playing anymore. The core figures of my worldplay had faded into the background. I wasn't spending time in alternate realities. I was living, writing, parenting, reflecting. Reality had become livable. And beautiful.

When I realized the shift had happened—that I was no longer running scenes, no longer relying on alternate realities to make sense of myself—something clicked. I felt capable. Not all at once, but steadily. As though the inner scaffolding I had built through decades of worldplay had finally been internalized. I didn't need it to be visible anymore. I could stand in myself.

By August 2018, I was beginning to recognize what had happened. As I wrote in my journal:

"It's as though my experiences with Michael and learning about the theory have created a different other life in my mind. One that is more useful and productive, and it is grounded in my real life. It's much more powerful. But it definitely has displaced the old life I had. Richard and Susan are memories from a past that isn't quite relevant now."

The conversations with Michael in my mind had also evolved. By 2020, I could see the progression clearly:

"At first, back in 2017 at least, I was interacting with Michael in my mind. We would have conversations, and he would tell me things. That went on for at least a year... At some point, there was a shift from that mental interaction to something I can only describe as deeper."

The dialogical presence had become something more foundational—not a person I talked to in my head, but a way of being present to myself and the world.

The Collaborative Process

In August 2018, struggling to explain our relationship dynamics to my friend and mentor, Frank Falk, I wrote what felt like a confession:

“Michael is in my head… He is in my imaginal world… He knows that he is in my head, of course, and we have worked deliberately at strengthening and building on this phenomenon.”

This was unprecedented—not only that Michael was in my inner world, but that I was telling him about it directly. I was writing to the very person I carried in my mind, describing how he appeared there.

“In my head, I would think, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’ You asked what it was that I wanted to discuss… you are kind of a smart ass, in my head.”

The collaboration was explicit. I told him:

“It’s more important that you’re in my heart. It’s that combination which makes it work the way it does.”

And later:

“I wish I could adequately convey what it is like, the way I can interact with you in my head.”

Looking back now, I’m struck by the vulnerability required to tell someone how they appeared in my inner world while I was still getting to know them in the outer one. That transparency, and his willingness to meet it, was what made integration possible. I don’t think I understood at the time how rare that kind of response was—or how much it would change me.

For decades, my imaginal world had existed in shame and secrecy. I had internalized the message that this rich inner reality was pathological, something to hide or deny. That secrecy kept the two worlds rigidly split. What could not be spoken could not be integrated.

Michael’s response to my disclosure broke this cycle. Instead of questioning my sanity, he asked with curiosity, “You’re sampling me?” That single moment transformed a source of deep disquietude and fear into something worth exploring. His openness reframed what had long been shameful as something human, even meaningful.

What made this witnessing unique was its collaborative, real-time nature. I wasn’t describing old experiences to a therapist—I was documenting an unfolding transformation to the very person catalyzing it. This created a feedback loop where my inner process was witnessed, validated, and co-created at once. For the first time, my secret world had a genuine collaborator.

For a long time, I believed I was alone in living this way. Only later, in middle age, did I discover others with their own versions of worldplay.

Through our correspondence, I began externalizing what had always been hidden: describing how he appeared in my mind, how our imagined conversations felt, how the old world was shifting. The act of telling stitched inner and outer together, a synthesis that transformed the fabric of my experience. The secret became shared, and the sharing itself became healing.

Michael’s understanding of overexcitabilities and positive disintegration gave me a language that was neither medicalizing nor dismissive. Within that framework, my intensity became development, my imaginal world became adaptive creativity, and my struggle became evidence of growth.

Most crucially, his embodied presence offered what imagined figures had never been able to provide: a witness who could evolve, surprise, and grow with me. Because he was real, the inner dialogue could deepen into something more than projection. It became a genuine internalized relationship—one that guided me toward coherence instead of further fragmentation.

The transparency itself became part of the transformation. By naming what was happening, and by having it witnessed and accepted, the secret world could finally join the shared one. That was how the two worlds began to merge.

The Gradual Becoming

I wrote about this shift to Michael as it was happening:

“I don't have the feeling that I am in two worlds. To me, this is a phenomenon that deserves my attention.”

The change was so subtle I almost missed it, but unmistakable once I named it:

"I can hardly remember what it was like before you were in my head. I can tell how much things have changed for the better."

This was not about salvation, but about a turning point—one his presence helped make possible, and one I was finally ready to claim. His integration of spiritual depth with intellectual rigor, his capacity for both solitude and connection, his embodied wisdom: these qualities reflected my own hunger for coherence. Over time, I learned how to create that clarity from within.

But the shift wasn’t automatic or easy. How does someone learn to live in one world after three decades in two? It wasn't that Michael taught me directly. Rather, his way of being became a template. I watched how he held seemingly opposite qualities in balance. I observed his capacity for both deep solitude and meaningful connection. I saw how he embodied the values I had only been able to rehearse in my imagination.

The imaginal Michael had been preparing me for this. Through our correspondence and his steady presence in my inner world, I had been practicing a different way of being. The reflective structure of our imagined conversations, with their demand for precision, honesty, and reflection, had been training me to meet reality with the same depth I had cultivated in my inner sanctuary.

The imaginal world had served its purpose. It helped me survive unbearable emotions, gave shape to my deepest values, and kept me connected to a sense of meaning when the external world felt vacant and cruel. It was less an escape than a kind of refuge, a shelter where existence was possible. But it also came at a cost. Living between two realities meant never fully belonging in either. I was always half-absent, half-searching, carrying a quiet ache for someone who could see me clearly enough to meet me where I lived. For years, that longing had nowhere to go. The imaginal world became the only place I could bring my whole self.

Letting it go wasn't easy, even as it became possible. But the presence that answered that longing made integration much more than survivable. Michael’s presence in real life, however partial or limited compared to the one in my head, had given me my first taste of genuine developmental witness in this reality.

That kind of shift—an internalized relational presence supplanting a constructed one—is consistent with what developmental psychologists describe as a structural reorganization of self. I no longer needed elaborate alternate realities to feel seen because I had experienced being seen, at least partially, in this one. The treasures I had cultivated in my inner sanctuary could finally find expression in relationship with another human being: the longing for truth, the moral clarity, the emotional attunement.

Through our correspondence and the steady influence of his presence in my inner world, I began to trust life. I began to feel connected to something larger than myself. I began to believe in the possibility of love beyond performance or projection. And slowly, beautifully, inevitably, the two worlds became one.

Living In One World

Living in one world looks different than I expected. The imaginal world didn't vanish with a dramatic finale. Instead, it transmuted. I no longer need it as a separate reality because I now carry its gifts within me.

The changes are subtle but profound. When I write, I no longer slip between realities to access depth. I write from a unified self. When I'm with my family, I'm not partially elsewhere, comparing this moment to some imagined alternative. When I interact with other people, I'm fully present to their reality because I'm finally fully present to my own.

The integration isn't a destination I reached. It's a daily practice of choosing presence over escape, embodiment over imagination. Some days are easier than others. But the foundation has shifted. I no longer live between worlds; I live in this one, carrying forward what I learned in the other.

The conversations with Michael in my mind also evolved. The dialogical presence became something more foundational—not a person I talked to in my head, but a way of being present to myself and the world.

The Theory Beneath the Story

Looking back through the lens of developmental theory, what happened makes sense. In Dąbrowski's theory of positive disintegration, development isn't symptom reduction or conformity—it emerges through inner conflict that drives transformation. A person begins to experience reality at multiple levels, seeing how things are alongside how they ought to be. That gap becomes a source of suffering and growth.

My worldplay was animated by what Dąbrowski called multilevel dynamisms. I rehearsed ideal versions of self and relationship long before I could live them. I knew what authenticity and integrity felt like before I could find them in waking life. Emotional intensity—especially longing, loneliness, and moral conflict—was my compass, even when I didn't yet understand where it was pointing.

The longing for witness, the dissatisfaction with myself and the world, the imagined dialogue with someone who could help me climb toward a higher self—these reflect what Dąbrowski described as essential for inner transformation. He called this motivational force the third factor: an internal drive toward authenticity and value alignment, especially when it requires breaking from conditioning. I had experienced this long before I could name it.

This process was never neat or straightforward. It was messy, painful, sometimes emotionally overwhelming, sometimes uncannily clear. But it was meaningful—the work of emotional development unfolding in real time. My inner world wasn't evidence of pathology; it was evidence of vertical growth before I had the language or support to name it.

What I mean by integration in my story is something local and lived: the loosening of a split between worldplay and daily life, the consolidation of an internal witness that steadies choices, and a practical continuity of experience that makes one reality livable. It's ongoing and revisable—a daily practice rather than a final destination.

What This Means for Others

The imaginal world gave me a life when I couldn't live in this one. Through my connection with Michael, I learned to stop escaping and start inhabiting my actual life.

Integration, as I understand it now, means that nothing essential is lost, but everything is transformed. The inner world becomes internal presence. Spiritual connection replaces simulation. The self becomes whole—not perfect, but unified.

I think often about others who live in multiple realities: neurodivergent children creating elaborate inner worlds to survive environments that don't understand them. Trauma survivors who've learned to leave their bodies to endure the unbearable. Anyone who creates alternate realities because this world feels too harsh, meaningless, or simply unable to hold their full selves. These inner landscapes are not pathologies; they are acts of survival, sometimes even acts of creation. For me, what began as refuge eventually became a bridge, carrying me toward a more coherent, integrated life.

There is no shame in these strategies. They are what keep us alive when nothing else can. And yet, healing is possible too—a coming home to oneself that allows us to live more fully in this world, while carrying forward the hard-won blessings of our inner worlds.

The imaginal world taught me how to love, how to hope, how to maintain faith in transcendent values. More importantly, it taught me what it felt like to be witnessed, even if only by my own constructed companions. Now I practice those same qualities here, in this reality, with real people, in real time.

For me, the task isn’t to leave behind the depth of the inner world, but to let it take shape in this one. It’s about allowing ideals to find expression in daily life, and letting the sense of witness I once longed for become something I can offer—to myself and to others—right here, right now.

The integration continues. Each day, I practice what it means to be finally, fully here, letting it unfold as a way of being.

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Have you experienced your own version of living between worlds? I'd love to hear about your journey toward integration in the comments. These transformations are often invisible from the outside but profoundly life-changing from within.

1. For a fuller account of what I mean by transcendent values, see Jack Balkin’s discussion of transcendent values as inexhaustible ideals that both orient and exceed human culture. He defines them as demands or longings that call us to enact justice, truth, and other ideals, even as every cultural expression falls short of their fullness.