Daydreams and the Function of Fantasy

M. Regis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137300775
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This book seeks to re-define the role of fantasy in human life by overturning mainstream psychology's understanding of daydreams as being task-distracted mind wandering by proposing that all waking fantasies function to transform mood states into specific emotional reactions.

1

Obsessive Fans and Daydreaming Computers: A New Model of Daydreaming

Introduction

It is a basic human pastime to daydream, in the sense of entertaining conscious and private fictions. In their daily rounds and throughout routine experiences, people undergo and deliberately construct all manner of fancies, from highly intimate but fictional love affairs, to sexual encounters, alternate lifestyles and living arragements, different jobs and fictional calamities. Children imagine sporting triumphs, adolescents watch music videos and insert themselves as rock stars and adults imagine obtaining revenge on their bosses, co-workers or ex-lovers by attaining new careers. Individuals seek out particular genres of fiction; some refabricate storylines from their favourite works into highly prized and alternatively realised inventions. People entertain scenarios such as being able to fly, or surviving a plane crash, or observing their own funeral replete with mourning loved ones. In other directions, people use pornography to extend their own sexual fantasies, or find themselves having anxious daydreams about loved ones or themselves having terrible accidents or misfortunes.

So far, prevailing ideas have daydreams as task-distracted plans or a way of solving a problem when not trying to solve a problem (Singer & McCraven, 1961; Greenwald & Harder, 1994). Such accounts somehow not only miss the point, because they do not explain the more implausible or flamboyant fictions that are ordinary happenings in daydreams, but they also fail to integrate phenomena related to fantasy, such as attachments to special objects in childhood, experiences of infatuation or cultural forms that propagate our own private fictions. In response, the present work provides a new understanding of waking fantasies as operating to situate emotional reactions in humans. It is a model that can explain the production of content ranging from the innocuous to the improbable in both classically conceived spontaneous daydreams and defensive or motivated acts of conscious fantasy. As a book about daydreaming, it also explores and integrates various cultural practices that surface in relation to fantasy, such as advertising, some of our buying habits, favoured genres of fiction and the worship of celebrities.

The work addresses general readers, avid daydreamers, therapists and academics in the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural studies. The chapters are self-contained, so readers may, and should, skip about the work in whatever order they please. Some might like to begin with the chapter on celebrity worship and others investigate what other theorists have had to say about waking fantasy and the handful of models already established in the literature. It is not the intent of the model to pathologise either daydreaming as a phenomenon or frequent daydreaming as a psychological defence. As it attempts to show, problems with daydreaming are more about how individuals use or respond to their fantasies than the content of the fantasies themselves. Perhaps most importantly, the model seeks to uncover the conditions in which people maintain their own private fantasy worlds.

Why we need a new model of daydreaming

Many people, if asked to define a daydream, would understand the term to denote something like a waking dream or a waking fiction; dreamlike because the event often occurs spontaneously, but sharing the qualities of storytelling in that, while we are taken along, we are not so taken that we mistake the elaborating fiction for reality. Some may even venture that they can re-embroider or re-realise parts of the scenarios for their own immediate satisfaction. While many are likely to agree, in a general way, to having daydreams, most are unwilling to provide details. Daydreams are private fictions; few are willing to submit their waking fantasies to the shame of public discourse, perhaps because the scenarios are wildly improbable or fantastic, reveal too much about how the person would like to be recognised or understood socially, or owe too clear a debt to the individual’s emotional state. A few deny even having episodes of waking fantasy, seeing it as a pointless or wasteful enterprise. Then there are those who admit that they daydream all the time, inculcating waking fantasies throughout their daily rounds, for pure enjoyment and to blot out the ordinariness of everyday life.

The tension, in the sense of waking fantasies being both dreamlike and actively elaborated, is most obviously realised in popular cautions about daydreaming too much. While those who daydream frequently often see their use of waking fantasy enhance their daily lives, many people consider it as something of a toxic enchantment, robbing the individual of real world participation and opportunity. Such warnings imply that people have at least some control over how much they choose to daydream and the types of content they are likely to entertain. Nevertheless, people do it commonly and innocuously and periodic immersion in fantasy is familiar to anyone who has ever experienced an infatuation or crush, which unfolds partly as frequent daydreams about the subject of their desire. Quite simply, who hasn’t had sexual fantasies about a person famous or otherwise, entertaining scenarios of sexual availability with a certain actor or some other suitably charismatic person. The few theorists undertaking the subject have described daydreaming as ‘a wish’ (Freud, 1908), a creative process of hypothesis and rejoinder (Varendonck, 1921), any given sequence of thinking that occurs as a distraction from an external task (Singer, 1966), ‘the portion of stream-of-consciousness that occurs when one is not scanning the physical environment or undertaking instrumental sequences of thought’ (Klinger, 1971), or an imaginative rehearsal (Person, 1996), developing definitions that have more to do with judgements about how we relate to daydreams than daydreaming itself. Yet a daydream is a fiction of often fantastic proportions regardless of whether we judge it as being a distraction, or something automatic, or a rehearsal or series of hypothesis and rejoinder.

If it is a basically pointless activity, then it is difficult to understand why we daydream at all. One would expect, given the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry and their associated traditions, that the human act of undergoing or engaging in episodes of conscious and private fiction-making would be sorted well-enough understood to be an item of pedagogy or that its problems were standard enough fare to appear as a topic in undergraduate courses. Yet the subject is something of a swampy backwater. Every thirty years or so a commentator from one tradition or another offers a new rendering, but the gains are small and, when scrutinised, surprisingly incoherent. In psychology, the daydream is task-distracted mind wandering that, when healthy, should be realistically conceived and serve to solve problems. In securing an easy and ultimately unfounded account of why we daydream, psychology fails to explain the fantastic or unrealisable fictions that are the bread and butter of ordinary daydreaming. Psychoanalysis tends to keep the juice of the phenomenon, but reserves it to flavour more important ponderings. The daydream occurs as the maniacal ravings of the human ego, often florid but ultimately too conscious to be worthy of lengthy contemplation. The dream, as Freud tells us, is the royal road to our secret desires, not the common daydream.

Meanwhile, in its touchstone work the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition (DSM–IV, 1994), the American Psychiatric Association reflects an everyday understanding of too much waking fantasy with the term autistic fantasy¹. By exhibiting a pattern of ‘excessive daydreaming’, autistic fantasy is the maniacal raving of a troubled ego, elaborating often as scenarios of limitless success and love in conditions where the daydreams are too frequent and, with a nod to psychology, do not solve any problems. The DSM–IV defines autistic fantasy as:

The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by excessive daydreaming as a substitute for human relationships, more effective action, or problem solving. (1994: 755).

Yet it is unclear whether autistic fantasy causes problems because it promotes an avoidance of reality, or because the fictions are too wild or fantastic to be implemented as plans. The sense of the definition also remains compatible with very different views about what exactly makes up a daydream, healthy or otherwise. It is difficult to assess problematic daydreaming when no one seems to be able to define the boundaries of the experience or explain coherently why we do it at all.

The few available models of daydreaming to have emerged from the empirical sciences are also muddled. For example, in a study coming from the auspices of experimental psychology, Singer and McCraven (1961) included items such as ‘I plan how to increase my income in the next year’ and ‘I think about the specific steps to be taken in connection with my job during the next three to four weeks’, as being examples of common daydreams under the terms of mind wandering. Undertaking the study, they then discovered ‘more than a few’ subjects reporting Messianic identifications, fantasies of heroic achievement, homosexual encounters, and family murder with ‘some frequency’(1961: 157), a fact that is striking when considering the generally homophobic and religiously conservative era of early 1960s Middle America. Undaunted, the researchers went on to propose that daydreaming is nevertheless a task-distracted means of planning or problem solving, essentially ignoring how humans experience waking fantasies as almost hallucinatory realisations of various satisfactions or fears. In addition, the uncritical acceptance of early research has meant that it has taken over thirty years for more recent studies to question why so-called ‘problem solving’ patterns of daydreaming don’t seem to be solving problems (Greenwald & Harder, 1995, 1997), findings that suggest that the insightful elements of empirical data collection have occurred not as a result but in spite of current thinking about daydreams.

So far, when it is addressed at all, the human propensity for conscious fantasies is either mishandled or co-opted as a path to more important ideas. Since they are relegated to the outskirts of academic interest, it is perhaps not surprising that the more flamboyant and fruitful studies to do with daydreaming have occurred outside the central disciplines one might assume responsible for investigating the phenomenon. Under the umbrella of professional security concerns, Park Dietz et al. (1991a) offered rich potential in differentiated waking fantasy from episodes of planning and delusion with empirical research into inappropriate letter writing to Hollywood celebrities. Their paper considered which factors in fan-authored communications contribute statistically to enhance or reduce the likelihood of physical pursuit behavioural. Even research into artificial intelligence seems to do better in investigating the practical terms of conscious fantasy than mainstay psychology, with Eric T. Mueller and Michael G. Dyer publishing a series of papers in 1985 that detailed their attempts to make a computer daydream. In arguing that occasions of conscious fantasying are indispensable to a fully realised prospect of A.I., the two designed and implemented a program whereby a computer would generate multiple daydreams about being insinuated into the life of a famous Hollywood actress, with very amusing – and revealing – results.

It is a shame to see the phenomenon of daydreaming languish as it does because the everyday person is likely to find it interesting. Worthwhile treatments on the subject should be rich, juicy and even prurient and titillating. A book about daydreaming should be filled with accounts of unfulfilled housewives and Victorian hysterics; of infatuation and letters to celebrities; weird genres of fiction; pornography; phobic fantasies; and even the prospect of a computer being awash in fantasy. Accordingly, this is a book about the human propensity to daydream; not in the sense of being generally distracted from ongoing tasks and obligations, although this too is a human propensity, but daydreaming in the sense of undergoing or constructing episodes of conscious, private fiction. By providing a new account of waking fantasy as transforming moods into emotional responses, it explains the purpose of daydreaming for humans and develops an account of when and how it goes astray, since patterns of conscious fantasying for some people can become a significant means to manage or hide psychological conflict.

Existing examples of daydreaming

In a practical sense, daydreams are very common and yet they remain theoretically elusive. There are a number of examples of waking fantasy in the established literature and many contradict one other in terms of the proposed boundary, scope and purpose of the experience. While partly the result of competing definitions, such as the narrow ‘wish’ (Freud, 1908) and broader conceptions that conflate episodes of conscious and private fiction-making with mind wandering in general (Singer, 1966; Klinger, 1971), confusions in the array of examples are also the product of different approaches in reporting daydreams. Commentators have offered examples with and without their contextual backing and have even crafted artificial daydreams, writing up fictions about the fictions of fantasy. Consider the following, which includes an assortment of original retrospective reports (R), paradigmatic examples (P) and inventions (I) that theorists have proposed as being characteristic of daydreaming:

•‘As a child I imagined myself a great detective.’ (R)

•When, as a child, I was separated from my mother, I would imagine having an eagle chained to my wrist.’ (R)

•When I was a child, I liked to imagine making a hated teacher eat grass in a cage.’ (R)

•‘I see myself in the arms of a warm and loving person who satisfies all my needs.’ (P)

•‘When I am watching a film on TV, I imagine having a girlfriend sitting next to me. We talk about the movie. We share reactions. I embrace her ... we snuggle up ... this is a very enjoyable, loving experience.’ (R)

•‘I imagine a news team following me around while I do my job.’ (R)

•‘Sometimes I imagine accidentally meeting my favourite movie star and we become partners.’ (P)

•‘I think about the details of my next vacation.’ (P)

•‘I think about the specific steps to be taken in connection with my job during the next three to four weeks.’ (P)

•‘I plan how to increase my income in the next year.’ (P)

•‘I like to see myself being a superb baseball player.’ (R)

•‘I see myself winning the Irish sweepstakes.’ (P)

•‘A professor inwardly contrasts two interpretations of a medieval script whilst trying to unlock the door to his apartment.’ (I)

•‘A repairman, whilst doing repair work, considers how to collect a fee for another job.’ (I)

•‘After an altercation with a work colleague, I see myself having a pleasant and intimate conversation with the boss, who listens to me and believes only my side of the story. I suggest the appropriate punishment for the colleague and my boss instantly and sympathetically agrees.’ (R)

•‘Sometimes when I enter an elevator, I see myself being attacked by a hidden assailant.’ (P)

•‘Sometimes when I enter an elevator, I picture the elevator stalling between floors and trapping me for hours.’ (P)

•‘When I take off in an airplane, sometimes I am flooded with images of my flight going down in flames.’ (P)

•‘Sometimes when I see a beautiful woman, I imagine saving her from rape and she becomes my willing and intimate sexual partner.’ (R)

•‘I like to imagine an endlessly gratifying woman who supplies me with food and sex on demand.’ (R)

•‘Sometimes I see myself as a bull in a bull-ring being pelted with flowers by adoring women. I never have to face the matador.’ (R)

•‘Sometimes, I imagine myself as being safe within an iron ball, my kingdom from which I reign.’ (R)

•‘I imagine I am held captive on the field of a football stadium ... (I negotiate roguishly with my captors, then lead a bloody insurrection of all the prisoners) ... Although I am wounded I manage to free most of the prisoners and I l...