Do you daydream?
What were you doing before you landed on this blog? If you were at your computer working or catching up on emails, was your mind fully on the process, or had you ‘gone fishing’? This – I discovered – is the term used by one of my Nearest-and-Dearest to describe what goes on in her head during school classes that – ahem – fail to fully engage her attention. [For those of you who know me, that narrows it down to two, and you can probably guess to which of them I refer…..]
Methinks that there is a correlation between how often you daydream, and whether you would naturally describe yourself as a creative person. Because in an article that has piqued my interest in the Huffington Post on creativity (and that we will be exploring in future musings), one of the behaviours of highly creative people is that they regularly daydream.
Now the reason I say this reflects my own position here:
Do I daydream? Not often, I say, I don’t have time – brain too full of lists, and structures, and Things To Do. Daydreaming is for the airy-fairy types who have too much time on their hands. Those who aren’t really grounded in the real world, and don’t live their lives on a conveyor belt of what’s-the-next-thing-to-do/organise/take care of. Like lots of us Organised but Not Creative Types. Don’t have the luxury of sitting down gazing into space for no reason at all. As if. Huh.
So would the dialogue in my head go.
But again, there is a perception problem here.
Because if we re-frame daydreaming as ‘constructively wasting time’ we see more of it’s merits. Daydreaming aids the process of incubating new ideas, and creates space for them to surface. Connections are made that we might normally miss when we think of things in a purely linear, structured way. Many of us can think of times when our best ideas and inspiration seem to have come totally out of the blue.
Switching off our organised, to-do list, structured way of thinking (albeit often very necessary) also creates mental space and rest, and switches on the same neural process associated with imagination and – guess what – creativity.
For me, and I suspect those of you who are wired like me, the issue here is about giving ourselves permission to daydream. To stop seeing it as a waste of time, and not very productive. To stop feeling that we have to fill every waking minute with productivity and efficiency, and to enjoy pockets of time just letting our minds wander with no particular objective.
Earlier today I was cycling briskly between errands, and my default pattern was to use the travelling time to order my mental to-do list, and mental planning of events coming up in the next few days. And I could have done that, and it would have been valid.
But it was a nice cycle, and my brain was weary, and so I simply let my mind wander and enjoyed all the random thoughts and associations that popped into my head as I cycled past dogs, and flowers, and vapour trails and people with interesting hair. And lo and behold, a clear and freeing idea came to me about something I wasn’t thinking about at all, but proves to be really helpful.
This week, try it out a bit: let go and let your mind wander. Creatively and constructively waste a bit of time, and see what connections and insights you come up with, without even trying.
When you are stuck for inspiration, daydream a bit and be open to all that surfaces.