Some of us are affected by stories more than others. What follows explains this. I believe that if you are here now .... long after 1950s and 1960s "Folk Music" was popular you have Deep Narrative Absorption.... as is described in the following:

Deep Narrative Absorption In Fiction
Traits, Empathy, and Reality Perception
Many people occasionally "get lost" in a good book or TV series, but some individuals experience an exceptional level of absorption in fictional stories. Psychologists have identified certain traits – like fantasy proneness, absorption, high trait empathy, and imaginative involvement – that make people especially susceptible to deep narrative absorption. These traits can shape how vividly one imagines story events, how strongly one empathizes with characters, and even how one's identity or sense of reality is influenced by fiction. Below, we examine each trait and the mechanisms of narrative immersion, and discuss how intense engagement with fiction can affect emotions, empathy development, identity, and the line between fantasy and reality.
Traits Associated with Deep Narrative Absorption
Fantasy Proneness (Fantasy-Prone Personality)
Fantasy proneness is a personality disposition characterized by lifelong, extensive, and deep involvement in fantasy. Individuals high in fantasy proneness (sometimes called "fantasizers") spend a large portion of their time daydreaming or mentally inhabiting imaginary worlds. Classic research by Wilson and Barber, who first described the fantasy-prone personality, noted that these individuals often had exceptionally vivid fantasies starting in childhood. A hallmark of high fantasy proneness is that the person's imaginative experiences feel very real – so much so that some fantasizers report difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. In extreme cases, they may intermingle fictional events with real memories or even experience hallucination-like imagery. For example, a fantasy-prone person might recall a scene from a novel almost as if it were a lived experience.
Fantasy proneness is typically measured with instruments like the Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ) or the Inventory of Childhood Memories and Imaginings, and research shows it correlates strongly with traits like dissociation, magical ideation, and vivid daydreaming. In essence, fantasizers have an "overactive imagination" or "live in a dream world," which predisposes them to intensely engage with fictional stories. This trait can enrich one's enjoyment of fiction through rich mental imagery, but alone it does not guarantee emotional engagement in a story's events.
Absorption
Absorption is a trait defined as a disposition to become fully immersed and absorbed in one's mental imagery and experiences. Psychologists Tellegen and Atkinson, who introduced the concept, described absorption as an openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences – essentially the tendency to enter trance-like states of focused attention where one's awareness of the real world fades in favor of the imagined experience. People high in absorption might become so engrossed in a novel, film, or even a daydream that they tune out their surroundings and "lose themselves" in the story. Indeed, absorption often involves intense imaginative involvement, where one's awareness is immersed in the narrative stimulus while external reality is temporarily neglected.
This trait is closely linked to fantasy proneness (the two often go hand-in-hand), but absorption emphasizes the attentional and emotional components of immersion. Research has found that individuals high in absorption report stronger emotional engagement during narratives – their "heart is invested," leading them to feel the characters' joys and sorrows more deeply. For instance, in one study people scoring high on absorption became more emotionally moved and ended a story in a better mood, whereas those high in fantasy proneness visualized more vividly but didn't necessarily feel as emotionally involved.
Absorption is also associated with heightened susceptibility to hypnosis and rich sensory imagery. It correlates strongly with the Openness to Experience personality domain (especially the facets of imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, and feelings). In short, high-absorption individuals have a knack for entering a flow-like state with fiction – focusing intently, conjuring vivid imagery, and emotionally "transporting" themselves into the narrative. This makes them especially susceptible to the spell of a compelling story.
Trait Empathy and Imaginative Involvement
Trait empathy – particularly the imaginative facet of empathy – is another key factor in deep fiction immersion. Empathy as a trait involves the capacity to understand and share others' feelings. A well-known measure is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), which includes a Fantasy subscale that "taps respondents' tendencies to transpose themselves imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books, movies, and plays." People who score high on this fantasy-empathy trait readily identify with fictional characters, instinctively imagining themselves in the characters' shoes.
Not surprisingly, such individuals often become highly absorbed in stories – they feel the triumphs and tragedies of protagonists as if experiencing them firsthand. Studies find that those with high empathic imagination tend to be more easily transported into narratives and form stronger emotional bonds with characters. In fact, trait fantasy empathy correlates robustly with measures of narrative engagement. For example, one study reported that scores on the IRI Fantasy scale had a substantial positive correlation (r ≈ 0.59) with a composite measure of imaginative narrative engagement. This means avid fiction-readers who naturally empathize with fictional characters are often the ones who get most "swept up" in story worlds.
Closely related is the idea of imaginative involvement, which refers to a person's tendency to actively engage their imagination while consuming narratives. Someone high in imaginative involvement doesn't passively read or watch – they mentally elaborate on the story, envision unshown details, and project themselves into the plot. Psychologist J. R. Hilgard observed this phenomenon in the context of hypnosis back in 1970, coining the "imaginative involvement" hypothesis to describe individuals who become so caught up in an imagined role or scenario that it evokes real emotions and responses.
In narrative contexts, imaginative involvement might include co-creating the story in one's mind (e.g. imagining characters' backstories or future adventures) and vividly simulating scenes. This trait overlaps with both absorption and fantasy proneness – indeed, clinical research on dissociative experiences treats "absorption and imaginative involvement" as a unified dimension of immersive tendency. Individuals high on this dimension can become immersed in a fictional stimulus to the point of tuning out reality, experiencing intense imagery and emotion as they mentally participate in the story. Imaginative involvement makes the fictional world feel "alive" and personally meaningful to the individual. Together, high empathy and rich imagination set the stage for a powerful narrative experience: the person not only visualizes the story vividly, but cares deeply about the characters' fates, which fuels a cycle of deeper engagement.
Mechanisms of Narrative Transportation and Engagement
When these traits are present, a person is primed for narrative transportation – the state of being fully absorbed or "lost" in a story. Transportation theory describes how an engrossing narrative draws audiences into an alternate world, altering their attention, emotions, and thoughts as if they have truly traveled into the story. In a transported state, readers/viewers experience focused attention, intense emotional involvement, rich mental imagery, and a detachment from awareness of the real world. They may feel as though they have left their actual environment behind and are "really" in the world of the characters.
Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, who formalized the concept, developed a Transportation Scale to measure this immersive state. Key elements include empathy for characters and vivid imagination: "narrative transportation occurs when a reader feels as if they have entered the story's world, driven by empathy for the characters and imagination of the plot." In other words, being transported is a holistic mind-set where one's emotions and mental imagery work in tandem to create a total immersion experience.
Researchers have found that some individuals are more transportable than others – echoing the trait differences described above. For instance, people high in Openness to Experience (especially those open to fantasy and new ideas) tend to report greater ease in being carried away by stories. One study of young adults found that those who scored high on the "Imagination/Intellect" facet of openness were not only more prone to fantasy but also more empathetic, and these qualities in turn predicted higher narrative transportability. Personality facets like empathy, fantasy-proneness, and even a general need for cognition (enjoyment of thinking deeply) have all been linked to how strongly a person engages with narrative content. In practical terms, an imaginative, empathic person will more readily sink into a novel's storyline, whereas a more skeptical or concrete-minded person might remain aware of the "fictionality" and thus stay less absorbed.
Being in a transported state has notable effects on the audience. Emotionally, it can be very powerful: people may laugh, cry, or feel suspense as if the fictional events were happening in real life. Cognitively, transportation can reduce critical distance – when fully absorbed, one is less likely to spot plot holes or counter-argue the story's premise. Narratives that achieve high transportation can even change beliefs and attitudes of the audience to align more with the story's themes or messages. This is why narrative transportation is studied not just in entertainment but also in persuasion (e.g. in advertising or public health messages told via story).
In summary, the combination of predisposed traits and a compelling narrative can invoke a "trance" of story immersion, wherein empathy and imagination transport the individual into the fiction and can subtly influence their outlook.
Empathy Development and Emotional Impact of Fiction Immersion
One intriguing outcome of deep immersion in fiction is its potential to enhance a person's empathy and emotional skills in real life. Psychologists have long theorized that engaging with fictional stories – especially character-driven literature – serves as a sort of empathy exercise for the mind. When deeply immersed readers emotionally resonate with characters, they practice understanding perspectives different from their own. There is growing empirical evidence for this "narrative empathy" effect: frequent fiction readers tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity and empathy, even after controlling for personality differences.
In a well-known set of studies, Mar and colleagues found that adults who read more fiction (as opposed to nonfiction) showed better performance on measures of theory of mind – the ability to infer others' thoughts and feelings. Immersing in stories may train people's empathic imagination by continually exposing them to varied characters' inner worlds.
Furthermore, experiments have demonstrated causal links between narrative immersion and empathic growth. In one study, participants read a short story designed to induce compassion, and those who became highly transported by the story subsequently exhibited increased affective empathy and helping behavior. Specifically, the more a reader felt absorbed in the narrative, the more likely they were to display empathy-driven actions afterward – for example, highly transported readers were more likely to help pick up spilled pens in a staged scenario, mediated by the compassion they'd felt for the story's characters.
Another experiment found that deeply transported participants not only reported greater empathy for fictional characters, but also showed a perceptual bias toward recognizing emotions (like fear) in others' faces, as if their empathic attunement had been temporarily heightened by the story. These studies support transportation imagery model predictions that emotional immersion in a narrative can increase real-world empathic responses. Correspondingly, scholars of narrative empathy (such as Suzanne Keen) note that the shared feelings evoked by fiction can bridge to empathizing with actual people. By momentarily "living" a fictional life, readers may expand their capacity to understand others' experiences.
Emotionally, highly immersive fiction experiences can be quite intense. People with strong absorption and empathy traits often describe feeling genuine emotions for fictional events – a phenomenon sometimes called the "paradox of fiction" (why we feel real emotions for imaginary stimuli). However, there is no true paradox when one is deeply transported: the emotional brain often responds to story as if it were reality, even while the logical brain knows it's fiction. It's common for a deeply absorbed viewer to cry over a character's death or feel elated at a happy ending, because narrative immersion engages the same emotional processes as real-life experience.
Psychologists have observed that readers typically have to remind themselves that "it's just a story" to dampen these automatic emotional reactions. In fact, Gerrig argued that comprehending a narrative is by default continuous with normal experience – we naturally accept the story at "face value" and only effortfully discount it as fiction if needed. This suggests that powerful fiction exploits our genuine capacity for empathy and emotion, effectively blurring the line (emotionally speaking) between fiction and reality.
It's worth noting that developing empathy through fiction may depend on the type of fiction as well. Studies have found that literary fiction (which delves deeply into characters' psyches) tends to improve readers' theory of mind more than plot-driven popular fiction, presumably because it exercises the reader's empathic imagination more. That said, any narrative that encourages readers to mentally simulate characters' experiences can foster empathic growth. Over time, avid story-immersers often report a broadening of their emotional range – they might say fiction taught them to see things from new perspectives or to feel compassion for people very different from themselves.
In short, deep immersion in stories can act as an emotional and social training ground, enhancing one's ability to resonate with real others. This positive effect on empathy is one reason educators and psychologists champion reading fiction as a way to nurture social understanding in both children and adults.
Identity Shifts and Perception of Reality
Immersing in fictional worlds doesn't just stir emotions – it can also subtly shift one's sense of self and perceptions of reality. When people strongly identify with characters, they may experience "experience-taking" or temporary changes in self-concept. Research has shown that while engrossed in a story, readers can adopt the traits or viewpoints of a protagonist, even if different from their own. For example, one study found that after reading a narrative, participants showed measurable changes in their self-reported personality traits, more so than those who read a nonfiction control text.
Another experiment by Sestir and Green demonstrated that readers' self-concepts shifted to become more similar to a story's main character immediately after reading – essentially, if the hero is brave or introverted, a transported reader might see themselves (temporarily) as a bit more brave or introverted too. These effects indicate that during deep immersion, the boundary between self and character can blur: one "merges" psychologically with the character's perspective.
Identity effects can extend to group affiliations as well. In a clever study entitled "Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten," Gabriel and Young had participants read stories about vampires or wizards, then tested their self-perceptions. Remarkably, readers assimilated into the fictional group identities – those who read about vampires, for instance, identified more with "vampire-like" qualities and even scored higher on implicit measures of seeing themselves as vampire-esque (and similarly for the wizard story). In other words, deeply transported readers psychologically "joined" the fictional community they had read about.
These findings support what Gerrig metaphorically suggested: a transported reader returns from the narrative journey changed by it, much like a traveler coming home with new perspectives. While these self-concept changes are usually fleeting (we don't literally believe we are vampires or wizards after closing the book), they illustrate how flexible and permeable personal identity can be under the influence of narrative. Fiction provides a safe space to "try on" different identities and roles, which might even contribute to personal growth or self-reflection once the story is over.
Deep immersion can also affect one's perception of reality, at least momentarily. While most people maintain an explicit understanding that fiction is "make-believe," the intense engagement can make fictional events feel experientially real. Readers often report that after hours in a rich novel, coming back to the real world feels jarring – as if part of them was truly living in the story's universe. Cognitive psychologist Richard Gerrig noted that readers have to consciously exert effort to keep reminding themselves that a gripping narrative is not real; otherwise, they process the story much like real experience.
This blurring is why fictional narratives can evoke genuine beliefs and expectations: for example, someone deeply immersed in a dystopian series might find their mindset temporarily colored by the story's logic, half-expecting its fictional threats or wonders in real life. In persuasion research, this is called the sleeper effect of narratives – the ideas from fiction can linger and influence real attitudes, especially if one "forgets" that the source was fictional.
In extreme instances – often involving individuals with very high fantasy proneness or underlying psychological conditions – the distinction between fiction and reality can become truly confused. As mentioned, fantasy-prone personalities may mix fantasy with real memories or believe imagined events to have really happened. Cases of maladaptive daydreaming exemplify this: some people spend hours in elaborate imaginary storylines (their own mental "TV series"), and they may begin to neglect real-life activities and relationships because the fantasy world feels more compelling.
These individuals might intellectually know their fantasies are not real, yet emotionally and cognitively they get so absorbed that the real world fades out (e.g. they may talk aloud or pace as if acting in their daydream, losing track of time). In less pathological form, even devoted fans of fictional universes sometimes exhibit mild reality-blurring behaviors – for instance, talking about characters as if they were real people, or feeling grief as though a real person died when a character is killed off.
Parasocial relationships play a role here: viewers can develop one-sided emotional bonds with fictional characters, treating them almost like real friends or loved ones. Such bonds can amplify the sense of loss or joy at a character's fate. While fans are usually aware these relationships are imaginary (hence "illusory experience"), the emotions involved are authentic. Researchers Horton and Wohl noted decades ago that for some individuals, parasocial attachments can become so intense that they start to supplement or even substitute for real-life social interaction.
In sum, most people keep fiction and reality straight, but deep immersion can create a grey zone where fiction is emotionally significant enough to feel "real." And for a small minority with extreme imaginative absorption, the normal reality-monitoring process can falter, leading to occasional confusion between what was fiction and what actually happened.