u/ThePagerDude

they’re really handing the IP out like candy huh?

Maladaptive daydreaming is a condition where someone has highly vivid daydreams that distracts them from real life/affects regular routines like work or school. The daydreams themselves can consist of complex stories or scenarios playing out in your head, it's a detrimental condition that often functions as a coping mechanism for past trauma or other underlying issues that lay a foundation for it.

Given Jacket's high isolation following 1985/1986 going forth, he lives a depressingly lonely life where lingering grief eventually explodes into an unhealthy violent coping mechanism in 1989 when he signs up for the 50b newsletter. Fueled by the perception that the russians were at fault for the death of beard for the 1986 bombing- and therefore the entire russian mafia, he goes on an action-fueled rampage all in his percieved vengeance. Throughout the entire game up until trauma, Jacket is the one retelling the story all in his head from how he remembers it while he is in the hospital. He is a completely unstoppable killing machine that brings out idealized outcomes such as with the Biker fight where he percieves it as him killing Biker. Maladaptive daydreaming can bring out extreme dissociation where Jacket fabricates false memories based entirely on how he remembers them, to the daydreamer- they'd feel entirely real.

It would also explain hallucinating Beard into each and every shop/bar that Jacket enters throughout the coma retelling of the story, Jacket is so hung up over Beard's death that he will cope with imagining him as the friendly store clerk who usually ends up giving away free stuff with the haunting sentence of ''it's on the house'' that Jacket has clung onto ever since Casualties. It'd feed into his fantasies with idealized figures- like his dead best friend Beard to soothe his extreme grief.