How to Improve Your Daydreams and Why You Should

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

I have a habit of getting lost in thought.

Like any habit, I’ve considered the implications of my daydreaming — do I support the habit or do I actively try to reduce it? Although it seems innocuous, the wandering mind is antithetical to the practice of mindfulness. Allowing your mind to wander in unstructured rumination means succumbing to the monkey mind — a Buddhist term used to represent the “uncontrollable, confused, indecisive, or whimsical thoughts.”

Instead of suppressing these near unconscious thoughts, I conducted a periodic experiment. Could I capture these daydream-like thoughts and put them to use? Would allowing myself to go in-and-out of thought and then record the moments make them a practice in mindfulness? I hypothesized that if the mind’s natural inclination is to drop into the background, then proactively recording and analyzing the errant thoughts in the foreground would be a practice of mindfulness — taking note of where the subconscious mind traveled and creating a mental model of the unstructured outputs.

Here are a few of the things that I tried to take note of:

1. Where does the majority of my daydreaming happen?

2. What can I do to encourage daydreaming? (What sensory experiments can I conduct to motivate my mind to begin wandering?)

3. Can I solicit specific daydreaming trajectories by injecting selected content? (i.e. Podcasts, music, silence, visual stimuli, scents)

4. What is the best way to record? (i.e. Audio, written, etc.)

5. What is the fastest way to get in and out of a daydream?

6. How will I quantify the results?

The results weren’t too surprising.

1. My best thinking happens in the shower, walking to a specified destination by myself, or driving, nothing that requires a lot of focused attention (e.g. cooking, watching TV).

2. Since I don’t do much walking long distances by myself these days, the longest uninterrupted spans happen while driving. These 15m+ drives to visit in-laws or run errands allow me to foster daydreaming sessions that happen in spans longer than 15 or 30 seconds. To jumpstart the process, audio is the best sensory tool at my disposal from an attention and immersion perspective. Podcasts work the best, but ambient music is a close second, followed far behind by radio music.

3. This was interesting. I can direct my daydreaming in two directions — productive and creative. The most productive type of daydreaming happens when I’m listening to podcasts on a topic that I’m studying. Today, that might be the Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet, Ten Percent Happier Podcast, or Oprah’s Super Soul. Quite reliably, I could change the contents of my wandering thoughts. When I start listening to my Jazz Vibes playlist, I think about traveling, trips, things for Tammy, and other unstructured thoughts related to my personal life. Silence in the car puts me to sleep, but listening to the ambient noise of water in the shower gave me a random selection of productivity or creativity, which are loosely predictable based on the activities prior to getting into the shower (i.e. Was I on Instagram? Was I reading for work? Was I listening to music or watching a YouTube video?)

4. It’s difficult to record my thoughts in writing while driving, so I have to record my audio. The same thing goes for shower-time daydreaming, which is next to impossible to create a realistic workflow for capturing thoughts in writing even with a sticky pad on the countertop. When driving on city streets, I can take a moment to capture thoughts on a stick pad in my console when at a red light. It’s hard though. When I’m showering, I try to keep a record in my head and finish the shower to record. The best way to do this has been using a tool like Audio Notes or Otter.ai. I try to keep a notebook or sticky pad next to my bed in case inspiration hits at night or in the morning, but this is a rare occurrence. I don’t record dreams, I view them as entertainment. Although audio is the fastest way to capture, written word is the best way to record, retain, and use as a jump-off for analysis. I prefer this method and use stickies so that I can put it on my computer to think about later.

5. Surprisingly, it’s easy to become aware of these brief moments of daydreaming. See #2 and #3 for getting back into it.

6. I haven’t found a reliable way to analyze the creative thoughts, but the productive thoughts regularly make their way into my daily journal and blog writings — like this one. I will never let the stream of consciousness influence the entire subject matter. Instead, I’ll do additional research to learn more about the contents of my rumination to complement or refute my thoughts.

I enjoyed this process. Putting a microscope on my wandering mind helped me understand the value of letting this natural process happen. Structuring the contents and conditions of my daydreaming complemented my practice in mindfulness.

Willful daydreaming will never be a completely mindful practice. Feeling the Earth under our feet as we walk, noticing the pressure from the seat we’re sitting on, or the feel of the steering wheel in our hands while we’re driving is an important exercise in centering our minds and reducing anxiety (worrying about the future) and depression (thinking about the past). But allowing our bodies to fall into the very natural process of background thinking is a valuable habit and practicable skill in moderation.

To help place guardrails and create a structure for this unstructured type of thinking, I made a few rules that help me stay focused and not get stuck down a path of unproductive thinking:

1. Don’t daydream when you’re with other people even if you’re not having conversations

2. Don’t use your daydream time to try to plan for things out of your control, this leads to worry and anxiety (futile future planning)

3. Don’t try to record or capture everything that passes through your mind in the background, moderation is important and sometimes background thoughts and stories are meant to fly by in your subconscious

Joseph Goldstein, on Dan Harris’ Ten Percent Happier podcast, described this process as a mindfulness strategy:

“When we’re lost in the story, unmindful, we don’t know it, we’re lost, that’s delusion. The moment of becoming aware, thinking, that’s wisdom.”

Dan calls it the counterprogramming of the habitual. Whatever we call it and however you do it, the practice of observing our thoughts becomes a productive and healthy habit when done in moderation and with thoughtfulness.

Like any habit, daydreaming can be practiced, improved, and shaped to your benefit. You could let the fleeting moments pass by and appreciate them as entertainment. You could shape them into a meditative practice of your inner dialogue. I like how Goldstein describes these short moments as taking an interest in ordinary daily activities and how our minds are conditions by these seemingly innocuous streams of thoughts.

It helps me grasp the concept that these thoughts are a part of our daily lives that we can control, like the soundtrack to our lives playing the background, subliminally filling our minds with emotions of happiness, sadness, optimism, worry.

“This is another big area of meditative inquiry — that is the relationship of thought and emotion. These two are very interconnected. And the more we understand how thoughts condition different emotions and the reverse — that’s also a doorway into greater freedom.”