PicoBlog

Girl in White Chemise by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

There’s a part of me that believes daydreaming helped save my life, especially during the difficult years of my adolescence and placement in foster care. So, when I read recently that deliberate daydreaming is an art of “tracking wonder,” I saw that as the most lovely, intriguing, and potent idea.

To track wonder! How could we not wish to do this?

But the word “deliberate” is essential here, because although daydreaming is a natural human capacity with which we are all born, we lose this skill over time. What might once have been an interlude of daydreaming or tracking wonder can, in adulthood, easily devolve into worry, rumination, and even intrusive negative thinking, all of which are linked with poor creative insight and follow through.

Daydreaming, on the other hand, is “… part of our cognitive toolkit that’s underdeveloped, and it’s kind of sad,” says psychology professor  Erin Westgate, who also emphasizes that daydreaming differs entirely from meditation, mind-wandering, or rumination. According Westgate, daydreaming is “thinking for pleasure,” and it’s harder than we realize. “You have to be the actor, director, screenwriter and audience of a mental performance,” Westgate says. “Even though it looks like you’re doing nothing, it’s cognitively taxing.” As Michael Harris, in his book Solitude: A Singular Life in A Crowded World, says, “… daydreaming … takes practice to get good at it. And we are sorely out of practice.”

“In daydreaming, you don't have to create plans or know how to get where you're going. Your mind will see this as reality and new responses will follow.
So daydream. Daydream with your heart, soul, emotions, imagination, and courage.” ― Jeanne McElvaney

If we can train ourselves to do it well, deliberate daydreaming offers proven benefits, from lowering stress and anxiety, to increasing pain tolerance, to helping you to solve problems, to amplifying your creativity and engaging less-used regions of your brain. In part that’s because daydreaming can somewhat mimic sleep dreaming, where the mind is again free to wander, create, and explore. Like sleep dreaming, deliberate daydreaming can be a powerful creative tool for unlocking new ideas and more positive and expansive ways of understanding the world. So the effort to reclaim our daydreaming capacity is well worth our attention. As Westgate says, daydreaming is “something that sets us apart. It defines our humanity. It allows us to imagine new realities.” It can also, she says, reshape our emotions and make us happier.

Remember, though, we need to be deliberate daydreamers: Srini Pillay, author of Tinker, Dabble, doodle, Try says:

 “What you want to aim for is called positive constructive daydreaming (PCD). These sessions of unfocusing can be spontaneous or planned, and they will ultimately make you feel more self-aware, more creative, and far less bored. When you engage in PCD, you give your focused attention a break and allow yourself to plan and rehearse what’s to come. In other words, if you allow yourself to constructively daydream, you are likely to realize things about the future that you would miss otherwise.”

And there are two kinds of daydreams with particularly strong links to creativity—both of which we’ll explore in this week’s structured prompt, along with one of Westgate’s key prompts and several concrete, specific strategies you can use for the most beneficial daydreaming sessions.

I hope if you try some deliberate daydreaming you’ll share your stories in the comments and the chat!

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