Daydream

Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. When thoughts move to a different place while daydreaming it’s referred to as mind wandering. This commonality affects individuals 50% of the time while awake. Daydreaming is the term used by Jerome L. Singer whose research laid the foundation for nearly all the subsequent research today. The terminologies assigned by researchers today puts challenges on identifying the common features of daydreaming, and on building collective work among researchers. There are many types of daydreams, and there is no consistent definition among psychologists. However, the characteristic that is common to all forms of daydreaming meets the criteria for mild dissociation. Also, the impacts of different types of daydreams are not identical. While some are disruptive and deleterious, others may be beneficial in some way. Mooneyham and Schooler summarized five potential functions daydreaming serves: future thinking, creative thinking, attentional cycling, dishabituation and relief from boredom. Daydreaming can be a useful tool to help keep people mindful of their relevant goals, such as imagining future success of a goal to motivate accomplishing a difficult or uninteresting task. Creative thinking is another function of daydreaming associated with increased creativity. The frequency of daydreaming is the highest during undemanding and easy tasks. It is hypothesized that daydreaming plays an important role in generating creative problem-solving processes. Studies have also found that intentional daydreaming is more effective when focused on creative thought processing, rather than spontaneous or disruptive daydreams. Attentional cycling is an adaptive function of daydreaming that helps to keep people's behaviors relatively optimal when there are multiple target problems at the same time. When people have many goals, daydreaming provides an opportunity for people to switch among different streams of information and thoughts.