why daydreaming is good for your and your ideas

2nd of October, Cornwall


I am spending this week on a meditation retreat in a beautiful place in Cornwall, with old and new friends and a wonderful meditation teacher, Donal Creedon. Meditating for more than six hours per day is a mixture of beautiful, inspiring, deep, irritating, boring and difficult. 

On the third day of the retreat, when I finally settled in after a schedule in the weeks before, have had a couple of 9 hour sleep nights, the thoughts, plans, feelings, pains, retreated slightly. And while “resting with whatever comes” in the  morning meditation session, I suddenly had a few ideas about the “creativity project” I have been working on for some time now (and to which this blog is dedicated to - actually I had the idea of starting a blog in this session :-)).  

It was not really meditation, maybe rather daydreaming - the fact of stopping and going into a “deeper” place has helped me come up with better ideas than if I had spent the same amount of time more "efficiently" in front of the computer or reading articles and books. 

This reminded me of an article recently mentioned at Brainpickings website (a great source on creativity) referencing an article called "“Ode to Positive Constructive Daydreaming”, published in the Frontiers in Psychology.

Rebecca McMillan and Scott Kaufman write: 

(...) most recent studies depict mind wandering as a costly cognitive failure with relatively few benefits (...). This perspective makes sense when mind wandering is observed by a third party and when costs are measured against externally imposed standards such as speed or accuracy of processing, reading fluency or comprehension, sustained attention, and other external metrics.

There is, however, another way of looking at mind wandering, a personal perspective, if you will. For the individual, mind wandering offers the possibility of very real, personal reward, some immediate, some more distant. These reward include self- awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, and reflective compassion.

From this personal perspective, it is much easier to understand why people are drawn to mind wandering and willing to invest nearly 50% of their waking hours engaged in it.


So next time you daydream, do not beat yourself up for that. Rather, I am asking myself the question - how to integrate those moments into the creative process? For an individual? For a creative group (i.e. a theatre company or a radio production)? Rather than sitting for 4 hours with no break in the studio, go out for some time and daydream? 

Happy daydreaming to you! 

---