Raise a cheer for good old daydreaming

NO GADGET can beat the cheerful perversity of a roaming mind.

“What are you thinking about,” my partner asks. This is a tricky question, for although the answer might be something quite sensible, it is far more likely that the thought bubbles in my mind are too insubstantial for me to articulate without sounding half-witted.

“I am thinking (if my mental drift can be dignified with the word) about Flora, the very dull guinea pig I owned as a child, which disappeared into a gooseberry bush one day and was never seen again.

I am having a vivid flashback of the tarry drag of smoke into the lungs of a Gauloise, although I haven’t lit a cigarette in more than 30 years. In short, I am daydreaming. The wayward behaviour of the idling mind has been for centuries the subject of scholarly enquiry. Montaigne’s Essays, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are dazzling explorations of the singular quality of reverie, which Freud described as bearing the same relation to childhood memory as the Baroque palaces of Rome do to the ancient ruins on which they stand.

Not everyone cherishes daydreaming. Teachers and employers tend to associate them with unproductiveness and subversive tendencies.

In the 1950s psychologists were warning parents not to let their children daydream, lest they sink into neurosis.

That alarmist view of reverie has lately resurfaced. A report in the Smithsonian magazine describes the burgeoning of mind-wandering as an object of research, with particular emphasis on the relationship between daydreaming and happiness.

A 2010 Harvard study used an iPhone app to question people about what they were doing and thinking at any given moment, and found that although people’s minds tended to wander away from their present activity around 47% of the time, on the whole, they reported being less happy when daydreaming than existing in the present moment.

The same study found our capacity for daydreaming much diminished by the technological distractions that surround us.

In an era when every passing thought can aspire to the condition of philosophy by being published on Twitter, the codification and monetisation of daydreaming was perhaps inevitable. Still, no one has yet found a way to control the cheerful perversity of the roaming mind. –