in the past month, I’ve been working on a shrine for sandalphon from granblue fantasy. as part of it, I've included a section on my yumeship (self-ship) with sandalphon, which has made me do a lot of navel gazing… I easily fall into psychoanalysizing myself in the best of days but as of late I've put extra focus into trying to untangle What Makes Yume So Appealing for me, as someone who is actively repulsed by the concept of a relationship irl. so! this is that ramble. plus in my mind I have the utterly unfounded fear that someone will look at me stating I'm aroace and also heavily into yume content and… what? make fun of me? call me a fake yume? or faking being aroace? I dunno man, sometimes even if I know that my fears aren't rational I still feel the urge to combat them.
so! that preamble aside… I will start by briefly talking about yume in general. there's an excellent thread on twitter here that explains the gist of it. for me personally, I use self-ship(er) and yume(dan) as interchangeable terms, although honestly I prefer the mouthfeel of yume. I prefer not to use yumejoshi or yumejin for myself, and even only rarely use yumedan… Just yume is good, even if its not like, grammatically correct LOL. I am purely a romantic yume, and one who is A-OK with sharing. go crazy go stupid lets all yume together!! I think for me i prefer the term yume(dan) over self-ship(er) purely because of the implication of using “dream”… like. I am very aware that for all of my yume-ing its all make believe and escapism and at the end of the day I have an irl life and friends/family to tend to. I think yume is fine and healthy as long as you stay grounded like that.
as i mentioned before, I am aroace, and have known im aroace for a very long time. figuring out I was specifically repulsed aroace took a little bit longer, but I've had more than enough instances where someone gets too intimate and suddenly I want to claw myself out of my own skin that I feel pretty confident in that too. the reasons I'm repulsed romantically/sexually i think contribute a lot to my yume obsession but uhhhh I don't actually feel comfortable sharing the specific reasons here! suffice to say I have zero interest in being in a romantic relationship irl, to the point where I believe even if one of my yume targets manifested in front of me in the 3D, I wouldn't be interested in them…
seemingly contradictory to this is that I've been into otome games/dating sims for probably as long as I've known I'm aroace. when I first got my own personal laptop, I distinctly remember the first thing I did was go to deviantart and look up crappy flash dating sims to play through. I don't even think I was that interested in the characters present in the sims, more so the experience of simulated love itself…. I've known a couple other folks who are aroace and also very into otome games and while I've fallen out of contact with them I would be interested in seeing if the reason I like otome is the same reason they do. part of the reason I liked otome games so much as a teen was I think the feeling of connection… I was so incredibly shy as a child and I didn't yet have the ample internet connections to make online friends and therefore have a veil of pseudo anonymity to hide behind. so I found solace in many middling dating sims people put out. also when I say dating sims I mean specifically ones where all the options were dudes. I knew at least that aesthetically, I was really only into dudes LMAO.
even when I went to college and my social circle expanded significantly I still played otome games frequently, or as much as I could with having a college level workload. I remember my days of ruining my sleep for mystic messenger… I think it was in college when I started toying around with yume more “seriously”. like, when I played otome games prior to that I didn't necessarily insert myself into the protagonists spot? if a protagonist wasn't given, I just imagined a generic one. unconsciously, I think I always needed a buffer between me and the fictional guy, even beyond the obvious “I'm a real person and he's not” bit. even if (in the case of mystic messenger) 707 was calling “me” to talk to me, in my head I couldn't imagine it as him talking to me, the physical 3D person. I ended up designing protagonist ocs for games like mystic messenger and the arcana that I would then ship with the fictional guy I was laser focused on. while the ocs had elements of the real life me, I think [for the most part] ended up mostly looking/acting Not Like Me. I sort of treated them as an extension of myself rather than myself in whole… I say that in the past tense but making ocs and then calling them self inserts and shipping them with characters is still something I do. and really, what I need to do with yume.
even in cases where I daydream about scenarios outside of the characters’ canon (eg modern aus) i cannot imagine myself (as in, the real life 3D vita) with them. it feels bad! in short. I always have to visualize my internet persona with them instead. null (or error. or demo. or whatever else i feel like calling them that day) is a sona I've used for a while as a way to represent me in art since I don't like drawing myself as I look IRL (even outside of yume stuff). they have a generic enough lore that I can drag and drop them into pairings w/o much effort whenever I'm not using an oc/self-insert specifically tailored to that character's canon. they are me, but also their own character. almost like the IRL vita with a filter, a protective layer between the 2D and the 3D… I find it fascinating how my brain Needs to have that sort of buffer layer in the form of my internet sona or a oc to engage in yume. I am certain that the reason I am repulsed irl is the same reason why I need an oc buffer in my yumeships… which is still something I don't want to talk about here or publicly ever! sorry!! please be satisfied with my cryptic hints toward it.
despite all of that, I think there is a part of me deep down that still craves a relationship even if irl i am interested in no one. yume then, provides a safe playground for this desire where I can never ever be hurt. be that accidentally triggering my repulsion or making a fool of myself in front of a person. it's escapism of course, but I think its a special kind of escapism for me where I can toy with scenarios that realistically I wouldn't seek out IRL. the fact that most of my yume targets live in a fantasy world far distanced from the mundane daily life I have is another buffer layer I unconsciously seek. basically, the further away from reality the character and canon is, the better! I have little to no interest in live action media partially for this reason, LOL, since live action is always going to be at least somewhat grounded.
yume also provides a space to entertain situations that would be undesirable in real life. for example, I yumeship with ghostface from dead by daylight! its a relationship that would be wildly unhealthy IRL but is entertaining in a fictional sense. the kind of unhinged yan4yan relationship that my survivor self insert and ghostface have is something I view as like a schlocky B horror movie. trashy, and grotesque, but in a fun way. its definitely something I only enjoy because it is so wildly separated from reality. its probably also because I have a background in enjoying horror media that I think its fun to write about my S/I and ghostface hunting down each other repeatedly in a world where death has the stopping power of a slap on the wrist.
I think another appealing part of yume is represented very succinctly in this tumblr post: 
sometimes your brain is a wild animal that refuses to listen to reason and so you have to trick it into doing things. at least for me. so telling myself that I need to get out of bed doesn't work, but pretending my fictional boyfriend is telling me to get out of bed Does. most of the time.
it’s definetly a strange sort of feeling to want to be loved while knowing realistically I would not want to be in a relationship, ever. liking the concept much more than reality, I suppose. anyways, I am interested in knowing if any other yumes experience the same sort of thoughts/feelings, so I invite you to sound off in my guestbook if any of this resonates.