Imagine the following situation. You are participating in a Zoom call. One of your colleagues is pontificating on a recent customer visit. You are working from home, and you hear your university’s marching band practicing. You cadence of the drum line invokes an imagery of an upcoming game you plan to attend. You will be reuniting with college classmates who you haven’t seen in years. Suddenly, you hear your name and you are asked for your thoughts on the customer visit that was being described. You have no idea how to respond because you had zoned out after the first few minutes of the presentation.
The above situation is probably similar to many experiences each of us has had. We call it daydreaming. Professor Jerome Singer, a clinical psychologist, first used that name. It is also called mind wandering. At first, our understanding of daydreams was largely based on self-reporting. With the ability to conduct brain scans, we now know much more about daydreams.
There are three types of daydreams:
- Constructive–these are positive and often used in planning or remembering pleasant experiences.
- Guilt-laden–these are ruminations about unpleasant experiences from the past or upcoming.
- Poor attention–these are random thoughts about content other than where the mind should be focused.
Daydreams originate in the brain’s default network. This part of the brain is independent of events in our environment (e.g., a Zoom presentation). The default region of the brain is the area which becomes active when other parts of the brain are not stimulated. Virtually every person has a daydream experience at least once per day.
Most of our daydreams are social in that they involve our interactions with others. We may use them to anticipate an upcoming interaction or relive a past one. They can help us understand our emotions. If our daydreams are about people who we are close to, they can help reduce loneliness.
For men, the more they daydream, the less their life satisfaction tends to be. For women, the vividness of the daydreams, but not their frequency, tends to be an indicator of low life satisfaction.
One common myth about daydreams is that they lead to more creativity. We now know that other parts of the brain are more involved than the default network. Daydreams, however, can provide a necessary “time away” that can be very useful in stimulating future creative thinking.
Daydreams, like much of life, are valuable when they are experienced in proportion to other necessary activities. They can be managed through self-awareness.
Finally, the environment is critical to the management of daydreams. When we interact with others, we need to be alert to how their brains are responding to that interaction. When our interaction is of little interest to others, we are encouraging their daydreams. There is an old adage that says, “There are no souls saved after 15 minutes of a sermon.” All of us need to ask ourselves:
- Do I daydream too much?
- Are my daydreams positive?
- Do I induce daydreaming in others through ineffective interactions with them?
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“Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.”-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow