 I'm Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignan Serp Lavre and Narcissism Revisited. It is healthy to daydream and fantasize. Fantasies are the anti-chamber of life. They often anticipate its circumstances. Daydreaming is a process of preparing for eventualities. But healthy daydreaming is different to grandiosity. Healthy grandiosity has four components, first of which is omnipotence. The narcissist believes in his own power, powerfulness, his omnipotence. Believing in this complex is a weak word. The narcissist knows that he is omnipotent. It is a cellular certainty, almost biological. It flows in his blood, permeates every niche of his being. The narcissist knows that he can do anything he chooses to do and excel in it. What the narcissist does, what he excels at, what he achieves, depends only on his volition, he thinks. To his mind, there is no other determinant of success. Hence the narcissist's rage when confronted with disagreement and opposition. Not only because of the audacity of his evidently inferior adversaries, but because it threatens his worldview. It endangers his feeling of omnipotence. The narcissist is often fatuously daring, adventurous, experimentative, and curious, precisely owing to this hidden assumption of can do and dare do. He is genuinely surprised and devastated when he fails, when the universe does not arrange itself magically to accommodate the narcissist's unbounded fantasies. When the world and people in it do not comply with his whims and wishes, the narcissist often denies a way discrepancies, deletes them from his memory. As a result, he remembers his life as a patchy quilt of unrelated events and people. Another strength of grandiosity is omniscience. The narcissist often pretends to know everything, in every field of human knowledge and endeavor. He lies and prevaricates in order to avoid the exposure of his ignorance. He resorts to numerous subterfuges to support his godlike omniscience. Before his knowledge fails him, the narcissist faints of authority, fakes superiority, quotes from non-existent sources, embeds threads of truth in a canvas of falsehoods. Narcissists transform themselves into an artist of intellectual prestige-digitation. As he gets older, this invidious quality may recede over the metamorphose. He may now claim more confined expertise, but still he claims expertise. The narcissist, the old age narcissist, may no longer be ashamed to admit his ignorance and his need to learn things outside the fields of his real or self-proclaimed and self-imputed expertise. But this so-called improvement is merely optical. Within his territory, the narcissist is still as fiercely defensive and possessive as ever. He still claims superior knowledge and superior authority with no commensurate achievements, accomplishments or academic record. Many narcissists are avowed autodidacts, self-learned. They are unwilling to subject their knowledge and insights to peer scrutiny, or for that matter to any scrutiny. Narcissists keeps reinventing himself, adding new fields of knowledge as it goes along. His creeping intellectual annexation is a roundabout way of reverting to his erstwhile image as the erudite renaissance man. A third element in the narcissist's grandiosity is an omnipresence. Even the narcissist cannot pretend to actually be everywhere at once in the physical sense. Instead, he feels that he is the center and the axis of his universe, and that all things and happenstances revolve around him, and that cosmic disintegration would ensue if he were to disappear or to lose interest in someone or something. He is convinced, for instance, that he is the main, if not the only, topic of discussion in his absence. This is called ideas of reference. He is often surprised and offended to learn that he was not even mentioned. When invited to a meeting with many participants or party, he assumes the position of the sage, the guru, or the teacher guide whose words carry a special weight. His creations, his books, his articles, his works of art are extensions of his presence, and in this restricted sense, he does seem to exist everywhere. In other words, his stance, his mark puts his mark upon his environment. He stigmatizes his environment with his fame, his celebrity, and his works. Finally, there is a much-neglected strand of grandiosity, which is Narcissus the omnivore, perfection and completeness. This is another omnie element in grandiosity. The Narcissus is an omnivore. He devours and digests experiences and people, sights and smells, bodies and words, books and forms, sounds and achievements. His work and his leisure, his pleasure and his possessions, the Narcissus is incapable of enjoying anything, because he is in constant pursuit of perfection and completeness. Classic Narcissus interacts with the world as predators do with prey. They want to own it all, to be everywhere, to experience everything. They cannot delay gratification. They do not take no for another, and they settle for nothing less than the ideal, the sublime, the perfect, the brilliant, the all-inclusive, all-encompassing, the engulfing, the all-pervasive, the most beautiful, the cleverest, the richest. The Narcissus is shattered when he discovers that a collection he possesses is incomplete, that his colleague's wife is more glamorous than his, that his son is better than his in math, that his neighbor has a new flashy car, that his roommate got promoted, that the love of his life signed a recording contract. It is not plain jealousy, it's not even pathological envy, though this is definitely a part of the psychological makeup of the Narcissus. It is the discovery that the Narcissus is not perfect, not ideal, superior or complete. This discovery does him in, as anyone who shared a life with the Narcissus, or new one, they are likely to sigh what a waste, waste of potential, waste of opportunities, waste of emotions, a wasteland of arid addiction and futile pursuit after the Narcissus' impossible grandiose fantasies.