Why Do People Daydream?

Isn’t it good to dream while you sleep? Unfortunately, as any daydreamer knows, dreaming awake is not the same as dreaming while being asleep. For one, you have no control over your dreams. In daydreams however, you have total control of what happens. You are the producer, writer, director and often the star of the daydream. Daydreaming is an enjoyable but distracting activity especially because it intrudes on the time when you should be doing something else such as work, or studying. Daydreaming has a bad rap. People who like to daydream are called lazy or goof-offs. What people do not know is that it takes a certain amount of creativity to daydream and that what modern psychologists are finding out is that daydreaming is part of the creative mechanism of the mind. Furthermore, during the daydreaming period, more parts of the brain are involved and what a person has learned from different points in time are able to connect to form an image that brings satisfaction to the daydreamer.

Psychologists theorize that the more creative a person is, the more apt he is to daydream. Apparently daydreaming helps the mind think better. Perhaps it is the freedom that the brain is in during this state that enables it to give free reign to tendrils of thought and allows it to hook the ones that are of most value to it. Why do people daydream when they should be working or studying? The reason for this perhaps is that the task is not interesting for them. It might also be that during the course of their work or study, their mind found something they read or saw in their work that got their mind to thinking of other ideas. It is easy enough for one to link to another and soon enough the daydreamers brain has gone to regions unknown.

Of course there are some people who really do not like the work they are doing and are simply too lazy to finish what they are doing quickly and shave off as much work time as possible. They dream of being more wealthy or popular so they do not need to do what they are doing currently ever again. These daydreams can be beneficial to the daydreamer if he uses these thoughts to propel him to live a better life. At the very least it should serve as his inspiration to make the dream come true. It is not enough just to go around labeling people lazy just because they space off occasionally. You can tell if someone is truly lazy by their actions. But if you children who daydream, tell them it is OK to dream but they also to concentrate too so that they will have more time to daydream about when it is over. Just do not be surprised if they ask you one day “why do people daydream?”