In defence of daydreaming
“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 halfwitted.
I am thinking 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 drag of smoke into my lungs, 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 inquiry. Montaigne’s Essays, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are dazzling explorations of the 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 those palaces of the mind. Teachers and employers tend to associate them with unproductiveness. In the 1950s, as Geoffrey Willans wrote his brilliant riff on schoolboy daydreaming, The Molesworth Day-Dream Service, psychologists were warning parents not to let their children daydream, lest they sink into neurosis.
That alarmist view of reverie has resurfaced lately. A report in the Smithsonian magazine describes the burgeoning of mind-wandering as an object of academic 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 from their present activity around 47 per cent 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 surrounding us. And dismayingly, for those of us who treasure mind-wandering, Google launched Daydream, an immersive virtual reality platform that is the opposite of daydreaming in that it is manufactured entertainment. In an era when every passing thought can aspire to the condition of philosophy by being published on Twitter, the codification and monetization of daydreaming was perhaps inevitable. Still, no one has yet found a way to control the cheerful perversity of the roaming mind.