Daydreaming

Psychologists use the term task-unrelated images and thoughts (TUIT) to describe daydreaming episodes. A daydream can be triggered by a situation, a memory, or sensory input and is considered to be an aspect of the imagination connected with the emotions. A daydream, or series of daydreams, can precede episodes of creative innovation. Athletes, musicians, and other performers utilize a form of daydreaming when they practice visualization. As the individual prepares for a competition or performance, they form a mental picture of the desired successful outcome. The unique characteristic of daydreaming is that it occurs in solitude. However, if the daydreamer begins to confuse these mental images with reality, the daydream is considered to be a hallucination. Psychologists estimate that one-third to one-half of a person's thoughts while awake are daydreams, even though a single daydream rarely lasts more than a few minutes. Psychologist Jerome L. Singer argued, “probably the single most common connotation is that daydreaming represents a shift of attention away from some primary physical or mental task we have set for ourselves, or away from directly looking at or listening to something in the external environment toward an unfolding sequence of private responses made to some internal stimulus.” The daydreamer experiences an inner process creating pictures in the mind's eye of mental sequences of an event or a situation or creatively constructed images that he or she has never actually experienced or may have varying degrees of probability for taking place. The daydreamer may use these monologues intérieurs or inner voices to escape from reality temporarily, to overcome a frustrating situation, or to satisfy hidden wishes.

Psychologists have been interested in the cognitive or information-processing model of daydreaming, for what it reveals about the complexity of human motivation. William James (1842–1910), in his The Principles of Psychology, introduced the term stream of thought to describe daydreaming as a process of waking awareness that comprises the experiences of direct perceptual responses, and the complex interplay of such responses with associated phrases, memories, fantasies, fleeting images, and inner voices. Daydreaming can reveal how experiences and memories are internally organized. Daydreaming and make-believe play in children can be considered to be manifestations of a natural cognitive capacity at certain developmental stages from circumstance and events in a child's environment.

According to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), daydreams are derived from the primary process mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and pictorial representation that link to wish fulfillment. Freud asserted, “The psychical process of constructing composite images in dreams is evidently the same as when we imagine or portray a centaur or dragon in waking life.” Freud uncovered a link between dreaming and imagination, while Carl Jung (1875–1961) took the dream-thoughts of directed daydreams and reduced them to archetypes. Freud felt that people who experienced daydreams were unfulfilled and that daydreaming and fantasy were early signs of mental illness.