Exploring Boredom, Maladaptive Day-Dream and the Search for Self-Actualization in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man”

Ranesh Rai

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85193

Exploring Boredom, Maladaptive Day-Dream and the Search for Self-Actualization in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man”

Author(s)	Mr. Ranesh Rai
Country	India
Abstract	The research paper explores how a state of “existential boredom” could lead someone into the state of Self-Actualization, a concept introduced by Abraham Maslow. The concept of “existential boredom” centers on how an individual loses its zeal towards life. A situation of lived experience where there is constant dreads looming and not touched or moved by anything. In my paper, the short story of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The dream of the Ridiculous Man” introduces an unnamed character who contemplates about committing suicide, he is driven by this purpose to eventually end his life by committing suicide. This thought of committing suicide for the ridiculous man could be due to various reasons. However, in this paper the suicidal tendency of the ridiculous man has been investigated as an extreme form of boredom which is termed as “Spleen” and “Tedium” a concept of Charles Baudelaire and Martin Heidegger. Previous scholarly reading of “The dream of the Ridiculous Man” has used the perception of existentialism, nihilism and absurdism but has not been attempted to understand the story from the perspective of extreme form of boredom and maladaptive day-dreaming. In this paper, it explores how the lack of psychological stimulus pushes the protagonist into a state of maladaptive day dreaming. Though in technical form he does not indulge in Maladaptive day dreaming but his dream shares the same attributes of maladaptive day dreaming not in a clinical sense but the patterns are similar where the experience is prolonged that does not occur in usual dream. This paper refers to several writers and thinkers such as David foster Wallace, Alexander Pope and Carl Jung to get a closer understanding of boredom and day dreaming. So my argument is focused on how existential boredom leads the protagonist into an immersive dream and it how it further paves the way to self-actualization or a moment of epiphany. The arguments are based on the synthesis of these three things and by using the method of close reading of the text, the arguments are drawn based on this method. The question that has been answered is how exactly he moves away from his decision to commit suicide because at last he awakes from this existential numbness gaining a new purpose towards life which becomes possible through his lived experiences in the dream.
Keywords	day-dreams, suicide, existence, boredom
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-06
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85193

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Exploring Boredom, Maladaptive Day-Dream and the Search for Self-Actualization in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of the Ridiculous Man”

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