What is Daydreaming in Psychology? - Positive and Negative Effects of Daydreams on Humans

Daydreaming is a form of imagination and a stream of consciousness. In a daydream, a person escapes from daily reality and makes a mental picture of past experiences or situations that he has never experienced. 

In this article, we will tell you about daydreaming in psychology, and we will present the functions and types of daydreaming, as well as the positive and negative effects of daydreams on humans.

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The psychology behind daydreaming and advantages and disadvantages of daydreaming for human health

What is Daydreaming in Psychology? - Positive and Negative Effects of Daydreams on Humans

What is Daydreaming?

Daydreaming is one of the psychological phenomena that everyone can practice within reasonable limits without exaggerating it. 

Daydreaming is a form of imagination that opens new horizons for the individual to his unknown future visions; i.e., it is the psychological process that allows the individual to live his distant or impossible ideas.

Daydreaming is the process of using mental skills and employing them to reach goals and desires. The individual achieves a state of gratification at the level of personal imagination.

Daydreaming is also defined as being the continuation of imaginative contemplation of visions during the awakening, and it is one of the adaptive psychological means for living unexplained experiences or impossible events and living with them as if they were fulfilled.

What is Daydreaming in Psychology?

Sigmund Freud pioneered the analytical school of daydreaming psychology as the individual's expression of his suppressed goals and desires.

Daydreaming is the state in which an individual enters himself to satisfy his desires and achieve his goals that were suppressed in the present or in the past in childhood due to the supervision of parents or society.

Freud also considered daydreaming as the state that falls between sleep and waking up, but recently, the scientist Eric Klinger carried out many studies in 1980 AD that dealt with the topic of daydreaming and found that daydreaming revolves often around the regular daily events experienced by the individual.  
For example, individuals working in boring jobs such as truck drivers, use daydreams to get rid of the boredom and restlessness they are exposed to because of the nature of their routine work.

In general, psychologists have not agreed on a consistent definition of this phenomenon. The most important themes in daydreaming are the following:

Functions of Daydreaming

Many psychologists have addressed the most prominent functions of daydreaming with a lot of studies and interpretations and the most important of these are the following:

Daydreaming is the fertile ground for innovative creative ideas, and it may be a necessary requirement for some types of innovation; that is, it is the launch of the literary story that the individual uses in his imagination.

Daydreaming is one of the automatic tools for the process of learning and planning, using previous experiences to anticipate and predict future events. Looking at past responses and the emotional state it follows makes the individual more open to perceiving new dimensions of the impact of previous events on the individual and on others.

Daydreaming is in one way or another shaping the process of communication between the past, present, and future, and its function appears by trying to review future events through previous experience and expertise; So that the individual is given the opportunity to choose the best alternatives, and address the most beneficial and positive possibilities and responses, and thus be able to get rid of ineffective methods and methods in dealing with the present.

Daydreaming is considered one of the most important and original artistic sections. It shows through it the capabilities of the artist and writer to adapt his artistic production by producing an eloquent sense, by bridging artistic gaps and pitfalls, and the approach between the reality that artwork represents, and daydreams that inspire creative and artistic ideas.

Some psychologists have talked about the adaptive function of daydreaming by offering the required enrichments to an individual's experiences and adding some elements that add some excitement to boring experiences and events.

Types of Daydreaming

Basically, daydreams are classified into two types, as follows:

Positive-Constructive Daydreaming: Positive constructive daydreaming is a dream whose positive impact appears on the individual through the process of self-stimulation, future planning, and psychological stability; so that it works to stimulate the right side of the brain and strengthen nervous connections, in addition to helping to strengthen memory, and therefore proper configuration in it helps the individual to create and develop the skill of problem-solving. 

Studies through brain imaging have demonstrated that areas related to the problem-solving skill, become more active during daydreams.

Negative and Destructive Daydreaming: Negative daydreams are dreams that the individual uses so excessively and exaggeratedly that they live in a world of continuous imagination that is very far from the real world and reality, in addition to drowning in a world of negative fantasy ideas and images, which lead in their advanced stages to abnormal results.

Positive and Negative Effects of Daydreams on Humans

The Dark Side of Daydreaming

Daydreaming can become a phenomenon or behavior that is harmful to the normal and stable functioning of an individual's life if it is used excessively and continuously. 

The dark side of daydreaming appears when the individual is immersed in these dreams while performing his various tasks or during the learning process, which leads to a loss of focus and poor attention and thus the loss of important information and instructions and thus the overlap that occurs between daydreaming.

However, the content of your thoughts may be the decisive factor in determining whether daydreaming is adaptive or unable to adapt, as uncontrolled daydreams such as anxiety, mania or stress, are harmful to mental health.

The job performed by the individual may lead to a low level of personal achievement, as the harm to living in daydreaming on mental health is demonstrated by dealing with negative ideas that are not very significant, which may make the individual tend to commit suicide.

Do daydreams cause a lack of concentration?

Much research has shown that childhood imagination and fantasy can be linked to creativity in younger age or adulthood, but a lot of research has focused on the effects of daydreaming, from impeding work productivity to overwhelming feelings of thinking by moving away from real life.

The role of daydreaming in improving mental health may not come to our minds due to the stereotype associated with it since our childhood, especially school days, as daydreaming was linked to negative connotations.

When it was necessary to pay attention to the professor’s explanation and take a great deal of information without straying, but the good news is that many researchers agree today, that daydreaming can have significant benefits for mental health, using daydreaming to motivate you to achieve goals.

Benefits of Daydreaming

Daydream benefits can be described more clearly than harms. When using it at the appropriate times for it, its benefits are clear to its owner when returning from work or from school and when going into these dreams, this will accrue to the individual with many benefits such as reducing stress and tension and forgetting negative events and experiences, in addition to many other benefits, including:

Training the brain in complex thinking processes such as remembering the past and predicting the future.

Daydreaming is mainly related to the flexible physical formation of the brain, which allows the continuous change of nerve pathways.

Daydreams make the individual more creative, sympathetic, open and receptive to others, in addition to sensing love and communicating with close people.

Why Daydreaming is Good for You?

Daydreams not only develop the ability to create interesting stories, but also our mental capabilities and the flexibility of thinking, and there are many benefits, which you may not know that daydream provides you with:

Daydreaming makes you more sympathetic: your mind focuses on either analysis or empathy, depending on the situation. 
The analysis will help you get the job done and empathy will help you deal with people. 
This is not surprising and when you constantly think about different scenarios and try to solve the complex problems in your head, you will necessarily feel ... that you are more relevant and more sympathetic to those around you.

Daydreaming makes you a logical thinker: Do not be surprised, as it is closely related to reading,

Those who read books rarely are less susceptible to the thirst of knowledge and also have the imaginative power that nurtures daydreams. 
While those who read it exerts its imagination to wrestle with the mind with these ideas and improve itself! Especially when reading science fiction books, because these books make you think about the future and how to improve society at the present time, in other words pushing you to a situation of positive dissatisfaction positively; to find ways to improve your life at least and this explains the role of daydreaming in problem-solving.

Daydreaming is the best way to overcome boredom: Daydreams come in large part from the fairy tales that we read, and the imagination that these stories reinforce, so you can make any boring task more enjoyable by imagining that you will finish it so well! 
You can also do this while washing dishes, for example, or taking care of your difficult child, by turning his problems into ways to play with him and trying to turn the negatives of his behavior into positivity.

Daydreaming enhances your aspirations: Daydreaming is closely related to fiction if you have a strong imagination and big dreams; it makes sense that you are somewhat unhappy! 
Perhaps because you are dissatisfied, whether with society or because of your life in one way or another, it does have benefits like if you can recognize a problem during a daydream, you can address it when your mind focuses. 
Because those who dream of virtuous societies all the time are likely to suffer about the imagined future, more than those who are completely satisfied with what they have.

Daydreaming can improve your memory: At least when it comes to broad concepts or ideas, the relationship is clear between mind wandering and memory preservation. Imagining historical figures that you have read about, for example, helps you remember information, and your mind works to consolidate memories in a state of rest. 
Taking information and memorizing it through daydreams seems to be a great way to absorb many of it.

Conclusion

Emotions in daydreams, both positive and negative, can affect how you feel after the daydream ends, as well as the way you control where you wander through your daydream. 
Therefore, by practicing positive daydreams or intended displacement, these moments of free-thinking can help you live the happiest moments of your life.

Do you want to take advantage of the powers of daydreaming? Read something that you enjoy and enhance your image, and then leave your remaining mind to you. 
You will be together with the great dreamers in this world. What do you think? Share with comments.