On Daydreaming

Fairies on the Seashore, painting by Francis Danby and engraving byWilliam Miller, 1833
image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Day jobs are boring.  This may not be true of everyone, but in the past it’s certainly been the case for me.

There are at least a hundred little ways one goes about making an uninteresting task more interesting.  Some listen to music or to podcasts, others get up once every hour or so and walk around the office.   You can keep up to date on office gossip.  You can see how many widgets you can process in an hour, and then try and break that record.  Whether it’s absolutely essential to my nature or not, the method I seem to fall back on time after time is to daydream.

It’s not that I’m not giving my work my full attention.  I feel like that would be dishonest; they’re giving me money for my time, I should do my best to ensure that the quality of time I’m giving back is the best I can.  It’s just that below a certain level of task complexity, using 100% of your attention gets the same level of results as using 75%, or sometimes 50%.  For me it’s a simple function of efficiency: a job less boring would take up more of my brain.  When I get bored I pay less attention, and the quality of my work goes down.  When it’s impossible to usefully give my work 100% of my focus all the time, I try and find ways for that percentage creep to make me feel less bored the whole time that I’m on the clock.

There are of course times when it’s not boring to be at my desk, for instance when something needs urgent attention, to be fixed or processed quickly.  Then it’s not an issue to occupy my mind with side-projects, so I don’t do it.  I set the daydreaming aside, and focus on the task at hand.

This might not work for everybody, but over time I find it works best for me.  (Alright, enough apologetics, get to the point.)

Daydreaming

I try and solve problems in my head, usually in the form of asking questions and telling stories.

I take stuff apart, try and look at what it’s made out of, what makes the thing identical to itself and what could be left aside without changing it.  I make up people and places, I put them into situations and try and see 

All of this is extremely short-lived.  Sort of a flash-and-its-gone collection of images passing by.  It’s also more difficult to explain than I had originally imagined before starting to write this.

Usually this requires some kind of data-in.  Nonfiction works best for me, because it gives the best high-nutritional content for open-ended speculating.  Movies and TV shows work in a pinch.

Actually that phrasing is unintentionally misleading.  Movies and TV shows are what my brain chews on for most of the time I’m daydreaming.  Or novels.  It’s just that the nonfiction-fueled stuff is more useful and better worth remembering.

For example, let’s say I’m re-playing a movie I recently re-watched in my head.  Generally I’m moving through the story beat by beat, shaking things that happen and trying to see if they had to happen the way they did.  Did that character have to do what they did to get out of that mess?  Did that villain really act in their own best interest by deciding on that course of action?  Sometimes the things seem to have happened for a good reason, and that’s satisfying.  Sometimes the best answer I can come up with is: because if they hadn’t done so, the story would have stopped there.  And that’s sometimes okay.  (Thoughts like these are probably part of why, re-watching a story, I’ll wish things could turn out other than they always do.)

Doing the same thing with well-written nonfiction leads to more interesting results.  What if someone like Napoleon I, faced with the situation at Austerlitz, had happened to zig instead of zagging at a particular time?  What if there were a world’s fair in the U.S. next year, the kind they used to have in the 1880s and 1890s?  Would anyone  go, or would they just watch the events on TV?

Not alternate history necessarily, it’s not an absolutely literal just how the different parts worked, how they might have worked in other circumstances.

The nonfiction books that are for me the most fun to use for daydreaming are popular physics and psychology.

Is there a way to make daydreaming effective?

For me, the most useful thing I can do is jot down notes.  Making record of any ideas that come up that might be worth remembering.

EIther a few words of explanation of an idea I’ve had, or a doodle that explains it better than words would.

Particularly energetic and complicated ideas will warrant full-out diagrams with exploded components, labels, short descriptions of all the parts and their uses.

And often ideas feed on themselves, so that you build up a mental box where you keep the things you like to think over, take them out, dust them off sometimes, roll them around, see if there’s anything new growing on them, or if anything that’s happened to you in real life since last time you thought about them gives them different emphasis or importance.

What’s the problem with daydreaming?

In the long run it’s the same problem with too much fiction in general: you wind up divorcing yourself from your actual life.

I think I’ve probably digressed into this terrain before; basically I think you have to find a balance between dream time and real time if you’re going to have a healthy relationship with your own identity and the way things are going in your life.  Daydream too much, and the opportunities you have to start and finish projects that are important to you will slip by.  Believe me!

There are parts of waking life that should be more interesting to you than the most vivid daydreams, because they’re real and meaningful.  If you need advice on how to make real life more meaningful, I will try to find a way to apply stories and storytelling to the problem in a future post or posts, but I suspect you might need another blog.

What do you do to avoid it?

Set rigid limits and stick to them.  The first of these is easy, the second is hard.

I’ve already said I try to avoid daydreaming when there’s something more urgent or interesting than step-and-repeat work going on.  My only solid advice is to make something that requires actual thought happen to you in the real world.  I’m not saying go around setting fires, I mean get up and shake your legs, make small talk on a break, take a walk outside maybe.  Go to a library.  Go volunteer somewhere.  Look up a new recipe and cook it.  See what turns up.  For the same reason you shouldn’t sit and read all the time (or sit and watch TV), it’s good to have an actual life and actual interests to fall back on, since even daydreaming, in the end gets kind of boring without at least having a reality to escape from.

The more interests you have, also, the better chance you have of encountering what the gurus call “flow,” and which is probably the healthy and necessary twin and counterpart to daydreaming in the life of a creative person.  But that’ also another post.

Either that, or set a timer with an alarm before you wander off in your head.  But maybe pick a song you're not fond of to call you back.

I generally only write down my notes between tasks, unless an idea is so good (or so headache-with-pictures) that I can’t ignore it long enough to finish what I’m working on.  I put my notes in a pile, and then I don’t think about them when I’m done with them, until I can find a way to put them to good use.

But then there’s another question.  Is there an effective way to make use of these notes?