A person who has a vivid imagination and creates or believes in fanciful ideas; a dreamer or visionary.
From Greek phantastikos meaning 'of imagination' plus the agent suffix -ist meaning 'one who.' The term emerged to describe people who engage heavily in fantasy thinking, whether creatively or delusionally.
Carl Jung studied fantasts and realized that people who live heavily in imagination actually process color, emotion, and metaphor differently in their brains—what seems like escapism is actually different neurology, not a character flaw.
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