Daydreaming and Fantasy (Psychology Revivals)

Jerome L. Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317697176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie clinique

Daydreaming, our ability to give 'to airy nothing a local habitation and a name', remains one of the least understood aspects of human behaviour. As children we explore beyond the boundaries of our experience by projecting ourselves into the mysterious worlds outside our reach. As adolescents and adults we transcend frustration by dreams of achievement or escape, and use daydreaming as a way out of intolerable situations and to help survive boredom, drudgery or routine. In old age we turn back to happier memories as a relief from loneliness or frailty, or wistfully daydream about what we would do if we had our time over again.

Why is it that we have the ability to alternate between fantasy and reality? Is it possible to have ambition or the ability to experiment, create or invent without the catalyst of fantasy? Are sexual fantasies an inherent part of human behaviour? Are they universal, healthy, destructive? Is daydreaming itself destructive? Or is it a force which facilitates change and which can even be harnessed to positive advantage?

In this provocative book, originally published in 1975, the product of the previous twenty-five years of research, the author debates the nature and function of daydreaming in the light of his own experiments. As well as investigating what is a normal 'fantasy-life' and outlining patterns and types of daydreaming, he describes the role of daydreaming in schizophrenia and paranoia, examines the fantasies and hallucinations induced by drugs and also the nature of altered states of consciousness in Zen and Transcendental Meditation. Among the many topics covered, he explains how it is possible to help children enlarge their capacity for fantasy, how adults can make positive use of daydreaming and how people on the verge of disturbed behaviour are often unconscious of their own fantasies.

Advances in scientific methods and new experimental techniques had made it possible at this time to monitor both conscious daydreaming and sub-conscious fantasies in a way not possible before.

Professor Singer is one of the few scientists who have conducted substantial research in this area and it is his belief that the study of daydreaming and fantasy is of great importance if we are to understand the workings of the human mind.

Part I

CHAPTER 1

Daydreaming: A Basic Human Experience–An Exciting Psychological Problem

Daydreaming, our ability to give “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name,” remains one of the most fascinating, if perplexing, phenomena in the vast range of human behavior. Associated in common language with terms such as “reverie,” “brown study,” “woolgathering,” “castles in Spain” and “looking into the middle distance,” daydreaming has long been recognized as a wispy, mysterious and yet intriguing facet of our behavior. Because of its completely private nature it is impossible to formulate a generally agreed-upon definition of this act. Probably the single most common connotation is that daydreaming represents a shift of attention away from some primary physical or mental task we have set for ourselves, or away from directly looking at or listening to something in the external environment, toward an unfolding sequence of private responses made to some internal stimulus. The inner processes usually considered are “pictures in the mind’s eye,” the unrolling of a sequence of events, memories or creatively constructed images of future events which have varying degrees of probability of taking place. Also included as objects of daydreaming are our awareness of our bodily sensations, our emotions and our monologues intérieurs, those little inner voices we hear talking to us somewhere in our heads.

The child dawdling at his dinner who can be heard softly imitating the sounds of Indian war whoops and pioneers’ gunfire or talking seriously to an imaginary playmate is engaged in an early form of daydreaming. The busy executive who finds himself contemplating a forthcoming romantic rendezvous while reading over financial statements, and the harried housewife who pictures herself as a chic guest on a Greek magnate’s yacht while stirring the soup are familiar examples. The absent-minded professor who fumbles with his key at the wrong apartment door while he is inwardly contrasting two alternate readings of an ambiguous passage in a medieval manuscript is demonstrating the distracting nature of daydreaming as well as some of its problem-solving characteristics.

Actually, daydreaming is probably best understood as one manifestation of the “stream of consciousness” so beautifully described by William James in his classic work The Principles of Psychology, which appeared in 1890. Daydreaming or conscious fantasy seems most likely to occur under conditions relatively similar to those of night dreaming. A person who is alone in a situation in which there is very little outside stimulation, perhaps most often just prior to going to sleep, is likely to find himself engaged in an extensive reverie or interior monologue. James introduced his term “the stream of thought” to try to characterize the complexity of the process of waking awareness in which one experiences an interplay of direct perceptual responses, interpretation of such responses, and then the intrusion of associated phrases or memories, fantasies, fleeting images and half-heard sounds. An important literary trend in this century has been the effort on the part of poets and novelists to capture the complex layers of man’s ongoing mental activity, conscious and unconscious, in vivid and communicable form. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake probably represent the most effective of these attempts but many writers, such as Saul Bellow, continue to make intriguing use of the method in novels and short stories. From the standpoint of the artist, daydreaming and fantasy are processes that are just there. Artists seek to capture them in prose, paint or music, and more recently on the moving picture screen, because of their value in communicating with an audience. We can enjoy the flow of good stream-of-consciousness writing and identify with the way the character’s experience meshes with our own, but as a rule we are not concerned about precision and consistency in material of this kind expressed in fiction.

Since daydreams are so often visual, the movies are especially effective in capturing their quality. In Midnight Cowboy, for example, there is a scene in which the Cowboy and the ever-hungry gamin, Ratso, find themselves at a pseudo-hippie party. Ratso stands by the lavish buffet table wolfing down sandwiches. Suddenly in a quick cut we see his long-dead shoeshine-man father standing beside him. We feel the poignancy of Ratso’s fantasy–“If only my poor old man could be here to enjoy this”–without a word being spoken.

Issues in Psychological Science

For the student of human behavior working in a scientific orientation, daydreaming must be approached with much greater care in definition and technical analysis; it must be examined in a way that lends itself to experimental and empirical research approaches. To catch hold of so elusive a phenomenon as daydreaming in a scientific fashion demands a very strict discipline in the investigator. It is too tempting to use one’s private experiences and to generalize from these to all humankind. For the scientific psychologist the first task is to establish a series of reasonably delimited definitions of daydreaming and related phenomena, and then to set up a series of operations which can test fairly specifically the conditions under which daydreaming occurs, its different characteristics as a consequence of different environmental situations or the personal qualities of the individual, and the various adaptive or maladaptive human functions it appears to serve.

Science is indeed a stern taskmaster but it may also be the most democratic institution man has yet devised. The goal of science is to establish processes and formulations that are capable of being examined by other scientists anywhere in the world. One must provide sufficiently specific descriptions of research or experimentation so that investigators in other laboratories can repeat the results obtained from any given study. In this sense there can be no authorities in science, for each investigator is duty-bound to make explicit all his assumptions and to present all his results as clearly as possible. Despite the unquestioned genius of Sigmund Freud as an innovative thinker in the psychological realm, there is no assertion that he makes that is not subject to question by the lowliest of graduate students, provided the student sets about proposing a logical argument or some kind of formal experiment or research that can test the great man’s dictum.

In daydreaming all of us are in a sense authorities because of the very private nature of our experiences in this sphere. We must be especially cautious, therefore, that we do not attempt to impose our own view on the whole human species. Thus, research on daydreaming calls for making a very simple and direct start at systematic inquiry of large numbers of people about their experiences under conditions in which we can establish some degree of commonality across groups, and where others in other parts of the country or in other nations can repeat and extend the nature of our research.

Does everybody daydream? Does everybody experience the kinds of stream of consciousness that have been so vividly presented by Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner? Despite the many uses made by psychoanalysts of individuals’ daydreams as a basis for interpreting significant reaction, the clinician’s data is based on the limited sample of people to whom he has had access. Much of the research work done in questioning people about their inner experiences has been carried out with very small numbers of persons, generally relatively well educated and often enough already trained for introspection by the nature of their literary interests or professional activities. A good deal of our information in this area is drawn from neurotic or psychotic patients undergoing treatment, or from unusually gifted and creative individuals whose private fantasy lives are expressed in culturally attractive forms. That Hieronymus Bosch or Coleridge or James Joyce had vivid fantasy lives can scarcely be doubted. But can we assert with any certainty that some of the prototypes of characters depicted in fiction by Joyce, Proust, Faulkner or Bellow as manifesting complex layers of inner thought actually possessed such differentiated patterns?

To study daydreaming more systematically, therefore, w^re need to obtain information about the extent of inner mental activity in various samples of our human species. To what extent do people generally engage in daydreaming and with what frequency? Can we speak of daydreaming as a single phenomenon, or is it possible that people differ consistently along a variety of dimensions in their patterns of fantasy activity and private experience?

Let us consider such other questions that one might look at in a more formal fashion:

1. Can we specify the conditions under which it is possible to increase or decrease someone’s awareness of an ongoing stream of thought? What are the conditions that govern an individual’s assignment of priorities for attending either to externally derived stimuli or to those drawn from his own memory system?

2. Can we move toward formulating any theoretical statement about what function daydreaming may serve in the structure of personality? Much of the original effort of developing a theory about daydreaming came from Freud and the psychoanalysts, who particularly emphasized its relationships to wish fulfillment, solutions of conflicts related to bodily needs, and as a partially drive-reducing expression of energy. The conclusions that psychoanalysts have drawn about daydreaming have depended mainly on persons who were seen under circumstances oriented primarily toward treatment of their emotional problems, and who are therefore not ideally suited for establishing repeatable scientific formulations. Psychoanalysis has provided hosts of brilliant insights, described vividly many intriguing phenomena of human thought; but its very nature precludes the possibility that it can provide precise enough definitions of phenomena that can meet the highest scientific criteria.

3. We may also ask what role fantasy plays in the child’s development. Can we specify some of the conditions of a child’s experience that foster the development of increased responsiveness to inner stimulation? How does the child move from talking out all his fantasies toward either giving them up completely or internalizing them in the form of private daydreams? Is there a continuity between fantasy play in childhood and the daydreams of adolescents and adults, and the whimsy of the humorist or novelist?

4. We may also carry this inquiry further by exploring some of the adaptive and pathological characteristics of daydreaming in human beings. Is daydreaming inevitably a sign of neurotic tendencies or personal disturbance, as has so often been proposed–at least by American psychologists, psychiatrists and educators? Are there any advantages to systematic training of children in imaginative play and fantasy? What are the therapeutic uses that have been made and could be made further in the use of imagery and fantasy techniques? What role, in the end, does daydreaming play in our ability to lead effective and interesting lives?

While I can scarcely pretend that these questions are capable of being answered at this stage of our scientific knowledge, it is my hope that this volume will guide the reader toward an understanding of what information we do have and, especially, how this information can be developed in a reasonably scientific fashion.

The Psychological Study of Daydreaming

Artists in painting, music, literature, the theater and the cinema have sought to depict the quality of man’s ongoing stream of thought, his daydreams and the moods they evoke, and the variations in the fantastic quality of these waking reveries. These works point up the complexity of the problem that faces the psychologist seeking to study more directly a process such as daydreaming. The range of experience covered is from momentary and fleeting associations generated by external stimuli through more elaborate memories of recent or even fairly remote events from the past, and then more extended fantasies that combine material from the past in novel forms, into expectations of future possibilities or into bizarre or constructive reorganizations of past material, wishes and hopes. How can psychologists approach such a complex and yet ephemeral content?

It is not my intention here to present a review of the history of research in this problem. Some indications of previous efforts will come up as we deal with various facets of the study of daydreaming in subsequent chapters. What I do hope to indicate is the degree to which the scientific approach hinges essentially upon a certain type of careful methodology that does not restrict the artist.

In the nineteenth century, psychology, while essentially the science of mental life, attempted to limit the range of the problems it investigated to those manageable by the available technology of the period. The focus was therefore on the studies of the individual’s percepts, sensations or images, Despite William James’s emphasis on the stream of thought, it was clear that what he was describing, while phenomenally a seemingly accurate image, was not yet susceptible to careful study. Thus psychologists busied themselves with attempts to analyze through introspective methods, or through the use of reaction times to colors or sounds, the differences between sensations and perceptions, or to measure where possible the persistence of an image of an object once one looked away from the object itself. The more self-generated imagery with which we are primarily concerned, the image evoked by an image, was scarcely dealt with in academic psychology.

At the turn of the century, the major controversy in the field was based on whether all thought necessarily involved imagery in one of the five modalities–taste, touch, smell, sound or sight. The leader of the group proposing that all thought did hinge on imagery was Titchener, who dominated American academic psychology during that period. Titchener’s students used a variety of introspective methods to try to capture the quality of their own thought and perception, but they were oriented primarily to reproducing in their imagery some clearly visible external object. For psychologists the controversy was resolved against Titchener by the research of the so-called Würzburg school, whose investigators were able to show that an important part of human thought involves anticipatory sets or intentions which themselves are not ordinarily reflected in direct images.

Perhaps one might say the origins of research on more extended aspects of daydreaming come really from the clinical investigations of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. In his exhaustive examination of almost every phase of human experience through the medium of his psychoanalytic work with patients, Freud not only realized the great importance in daily life of one’s fantasies and night dreams but also built the method of the stream of thought directly into his treatment process. Freud combined his own self-analysis with the material he obtained from his patients to put together a remarkably comprehensive view of the private experience of man.

While introspection has always been a method of psychology, it had fallen into disfavor in the early part of the twentieth century for the obvious reason that it was difficult to get two people to agree about their private experiences. The effectiveness of the clinical method was that it was derived not only from the intuitions of gifted individuals such as Freud or Jung, but was supplemented importantly by material gained from extensive analyses of patients done under what for those times were reasonably controlled conditions. The clarity and brilliance of Freud’s case studies led to a vast growth in the case method in psychoanalysis and related forms of psychotherapy, with the development of a very impressive body of material on the nature of human wishes, dreams, the variety of fantasies, the possible psychological meaning of slips of the tongue, the great variety of symbols shared across different cultures, and so on. Much of the focus of the psychoanalytic research was upon verifications of aspects of Freud’s theory, and primarily upon the content of dreams and fantasies produced by patients. The more structural characteristics of thought (its organization, logic, relationship to basic biological needs), which were also important to Freud, were somehow neglected in the analytic literature until David Rapaport and others revived interest in them in the 1950s. Apart from the case method there was some continuation of the introspective approach, moving in a somewhat more experimental direction, by persons influenced by Freud, such as Varendonck and Silberer, who tried to explore their own daydreams or their experiences of thought in drowsy conditions. We shall have a chance to look a little more closely at these methods in the following chapter when I discuss some of the introspective approaches to studying daydreaming.

Psychologists and other behavioral scientists have tended to be somewhat impatient with the anecdotal qualities of the clinical method. It is fairly obvious, when one sees the proliferation of schools of psychoanalysis and of divergent theories, that one man’s interpretation based on his own private examination may deviate dramatically from that of another. If one generalizes from private experience to all mankind one is in trouble indeed. In attempting to study daydreaming, therefore, some investigators began to move more in the direction of survey research techniques as a means of establishing a normal base line for understanding the phenomena, using large numbers of persons who respond to interviews or questionnaires. An early work on daydreaming by Greene attempted to tabulate the fantasies of British schoolchildren, and a questionnaire approach by Shaffer in the 1930s sought to determine if there were uniformities in daydreams across a large sample of college students.

Much of my own work has taken the form of trying by various technical methods to survey the frequency, content and structural characteristics of daydreaming in fairly large samples of the American population. Here the focus is upon getting at the daydreams of the average person rather than focusing–as in the clinical method–on those produced by individuals consciously seeking help for specific maladjustment. The survey method clearly has the advantage of larger numbers, but it lacks the intensity and detail of clinical investigation. The clinical method suffers, of course, from the fact that the patient is in treatment with the therapist, that the therapist’s own report is what one relies on primarily, and that these reports are often strongly influenced by the theories or self-justification needs of a given therapist, however objective he may try to be.

A whole new series of developments have taken place in the study of daydreaming and the stream of thought within the past twenty years. Some of these developments stem from the important breakthrough in the study of night dreaming, when it was found that laboratory measurements of brain-wave patterns and eye movements, in addition to some other physiological measures, could provide remarkable insight into a hitherto unknown aspect of human behavio...