Stop Daydreaming Or Let It Go?

Everybody daydreams, in fact, if you try to direct your thoughts, you will find that daydreaming is a kind of background noise to any directed thinking activity you might be engaging in. So if you find yourself daydreaming a lot do you give it its due as a natural process or do you try to stamp it out because it’s a useless activity?

We start to daydream when we are very small children and our daydreams usually reflect how we feel about the real ward. If our general emotional state is one of contentment we will have pleasant dreams, if we are not leading happy lives in the real world, our daydreams will be full of negative imagery.

Daydreaming can become so much a part of the world inside us that it interferes with our work and relationships in the world outside. Some people think that if children spend a great deal of time daydreaming, it means that they are not happy.

You could regard daydreaming as the source of useful visualization. You can have a rich life inside your head where you possess qualities you don’t show in real life, and you can do and say things that life does not allow you to do. We can use the capacity to daydream to rehearse for upcoming situations we might be feeling stressful about. We can plan situations or occasions with an eye to what has worked in the past and what may have gone wrong.

If a meeting or some other social or professional occasion does not go according to plan, what we call daydreaming allows us to replay the event to see what really went wrong. This is not the usual process of punishing yourself for your faults but it can let us see what other outcomes could have occurred if circumstances were a little different.

Daydreaming is usually a source of worry for people who find themselves lapsing into daydreams without warning and at inconvenient times. In this case it’s as if we drop off to sleep suddenly. Although the daydreams at this time may be pleasant, the fact that the dreaming is out of control means we could be spending large parts of our waking hours unproductively and in a world that bears no relation to the world our bodies actually inhabit.

So whether daydreaming is a good thing or a bad thing is mostly a matter of whether we have some control over it or if the daydreaming has its way with us. If we stifle our daydreams we will be trying to put a lid on the very basis of our active thinking and visualization. If we spend more time daydreaming than in active thought, then it probably doesn’t matter what we do.