Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one's immediate surroundings, during which a person's contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.[1]
There are many types of daydreams, and there is no consistent definition amongst psychologists, however the characteristic that is common to all forms of daydreaming meets the criteria for mild dissociation.[1]
Contents |
Society and the negative vs. positive aspects [link]
Negative aspects of daydreaming begun to be stressed after human work became dictated by the motion of the tool. As craft production was largely replaced by assembly line that did not allow for any creativity, no place was left for positive aspects of daydreaming. It not only became associated with laziness, but also with danger.
For example, in the late 19th century, Toni Nelson argued that some daydreams with grandiose fantasies are self-gratifying attempts at "wish fulfillment". Still in the 1950s, some educational psychologists warned parents not to let their children daydream, for fear that the children may be sucked into "neurosis and even psychosis".[1]
Freudian psychology interpreted daydreaming as expression of the repressed instincts similarly to those revealing themselves in nighttime dreams. In the late 1960s, cognitive psychologists Jerome L. Singer of Yale University and John S. Antrobus of the City College of New York created a daydream questionnaire. The questionnaire, called the Imaginal Processes Inventory (IPI), has been used to investigate daydreams. Psychologists Leonard Giambra and George Huba used the IPI and found that daydreamers' imaginary images vary in three ways: how vivid or enjoyable the daydreams are, how many guilt- or fear-filled daydreams they have, and how "deeply" into the daydream people go.[1]
Humanistic psychology on other hand, found numerous examples of people in creative or artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas through daydreaming. Similarly, research scientists and mathematicians have developed new ideas by daydreaming about their subject areas.
Recent research [link]
Eric Klinger's research in the 1980s showed that most daydreams are about ordinary, everyday events and help to remind us of mundane tasks. Klinger's research also showed that over 75% of workers in "boring jobs", such as lifeguards and truck drivers, use vivid daydreams to "ease the boredom" of their routine tasks. Klinger found that less than 5% of the workers' daydreams involved explicitly sexual thoughts and that violent daydreams were also uncommon.[1]
Israeli high school students who scored high on the Daydreaming Scale of the IPI had more empathy than students who scored low. Some psychologists, such as Los Angeles' Joseph E. Shorr, use the mental imagery created during their clients' daydreaming to help gain insight into their mental state and make diagnoses.[2][3]
Other recent research has also shown that daydreaming, much like nighttime dreaming, is a time when the brain consolidates learning. Daydreaming may also help people to sort through problems and achieve success. Research with fMRI shows that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving become activated during daydreaming episodes.[4][5]
Therapist Dan Jones looked at patterns in how people achieved success from entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Peter Jones to geniuses like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. Jones also looked at the thinking styles of successful creative people like Beethoven and Walt Disney. What he found was that they all had one thing in common. They all spent time daydreaming about their area of success.[6]
Research by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has found that people who experience vivid dream-like mental images reserve the word for these, whereas many other people when they talk about "daydreaming" refer to milder imagery, realistic future planning, review of past memories, or just "spacing out"[7][8][9]
See also [link]
- Fantasy prone personality
- Fantasy (psychology)
- Maladaptive daydreaming
- Mind-wandering
- Stream of consciousness (psychology)
References [link]
- ^ a b c d e Klinger, Eric (October 1987). Psychology Today.
- ^ D. Vaitl, J. Gruzelier, D. Lehmann et al., "Psychobiology of Altered States of Consciousness," Psychological Bulletin, vol. 131, no. 1, 2005, pp. 98–127.
- ^ Warren, Jeff (2007). "The Daydream". The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Toronto: Random House Canada. ISBN 978-0-679-31408-0.
- ^ "Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream". ScienceDaily. 2009-05-12. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090511180702.htm. Retrieved 2009-05-19.
- ^ Christoff, Kalina; Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler (2009-05-11). "Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (21): 8719–24. DOI:10.1073/pnas.0900234106. PMC 2689035. PMID 19433790. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/11/0900234106.
- ^ 'Daydreaming for Success' article from PersonalFreedom.co.uk
- ^ Barrett, D. L. (1979). The Hypnotic Dream: Its Content in Comparison to Nocturnal Dreams and Waking Fantasy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 88, p. 584-591
- ^ Barrett, D. L. (1996). Fantasizers and Dissociaters: Two types of High Hypnotizables, Two Imagery Styles. In: R. Kusendorf, N. Spanos, & B. Wallace (Eds.) Hypnosis and Imagination. NY: Baywood
- ^ Barrett, D. L. (2010). Dissociaters, Fantasizers, and their Relation to Hypnotizability. In: Barrett, D. L. (Ed.) Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, (2 vol.): Vol. 1: History, theory and general research, Vol. 2: Psychotherapy research and applications, NY: Praeger/Greenwood.
External links [link]
 |
Look up daydream in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
https://wn.com/Daydream
Daydream (Mariah Carey album)
Daydream is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey, released on October 3, 1995, by Columbia Records. The follow-up to her internationally successful album Music Box (1993) and holiday album Merry Christmas (1994), Daydream differed from the two by leaning increasingly towards contemporary R&B and hip hop. Throughout the project, Carey collaborated with Walter Afanasieff, with whom she wrote and produced most of her two previous albums. With Daydream, Carey took more control over the musical direction as well as the album's composition. Carey said she considered Daydream the beginning of her musical and vocal transformation, a change that became more apparent in her sixth album Butterfly (1997). During the album's production, Carey endured many creative differences with her label and husband Tommy Mottola.
On Daydream, Carey collaborated with Jermaine Dupri for the first time, and co-wrote and produced a song with Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, with whom she had collaborated on Music Box. It was also the first time she had worked with Boyz II Men, an R&B group consisting of four male vocalists. Together, they wrote the concept and lyrics for "One Sweet Day," a song that Carey co-produced with Afanasieff. With his assistance and the addition of a few contemporary producers, she was able to make a subtle transition into the R&B market. Daydream was nominated for six Grammy Awards at the 38th annual ceremony, during which Carey performed live. Due to the album's critical and commercial success, critics believed Carey would be one of the night's big winners. However, to her dismay, she was completely shut out, causing the subject to become very public and controversial.
Daydream (disambiguation)
A daydream is a fantasy that a person has while awake.
Daydream(s) or Day Dream(s) may also refer to:
