Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers

By Amy Fries

Find solutions, new energy, motivation, and the next big idea—all through the creative power of your daydreams.

Visionaries of every sort credit daydreams for creating conditions ripe for moments of insight to blossom.

Einstein, at the age of sixteen, pictured himself in a daydream traveling alongside a light beam, a bit of fanciful imagery that he later credited as the seed of his theory of relativity.

Mozart daydreamed about music as he walked and rode through the countryside—imagined sounds that became the basis of famed compositions.

Walt Disney came up with the idea for a theme park while idly watching his daughters ride by on a merry-go-round.
And that's just the beginning.

The author of Daydreams at Work, Amy Fries, has interviewed dozens of people to discover how daydreams have led them to start life-changing nonprofits, create innovative products and million-dollar businesses, and visualize their way to the summit of Mount Everest, to name just a few.

Though many of us have sensed the connection between daydreaming and creativity, recent scientific studies are combining with an abundance of anecdotal evidence to establish that when daydreaming, we are literally in our most creative state of mind, tapping into and connecting the most complex regions of the brain.

The beauty of daydreaming is that it's a process available to every one of us. Yet many of us know relatively little about it. In our production-oriented, to-do-list world, we practically worship the focused, directed mind. We laud the pursuit of the quiet mind after wearing it out with the stress of incessant activity and striving. Yet we disparage our third state of mind, our most creative, imaginative, problem-solving, energizing, and entertaining mental state—the daydreaming mind.

Daydreams are not a guilty pleasure or mere wishful thinking; they are your source for ideas, energy, and motivation. Daydreams at Work:
 Reveals the valuable & productive role daydreams play in your life and work—they help you juggle multiple goals, and plan and envision future actions.
 Examines how the Einsteins and Edisons of the past found inspiration in their daydreams and why the most innovative companies in the world—Google, Gore & Associates (Gore-Tex), and 3M give their employees the time and space to daydream.
 Gives you ideas for tapping into your own daydreams through stories from and interviews with entrepreneurs, inventors, psychologists, artists, writers, scientists, and athletes, including legendary mountain climber Ed Viesturs.
 Includes questionnaires and discussion guides to help you determine your own daydreaming style, and thought-provoking exercises that will have you using your daydreams in new and creative ways.

We all daydream—isn't it time you found out more about your most creative state of mind and how to work it to your advantage?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483512204

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 Amy Fries

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to:

Capital Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 605

Herndon, Virginia 20172-0605

ISBN 13: 978-1-933102-69-6

ISBN: 9781483512204

Cover design: Kathleen Dyson

Author photo credit: Rachel and Gretchen Eisenhower

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fries, Amy R.

Daydreams at work : wake up your creative powers / Amy Fries. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Capital business & personal development series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-933102-69-6 (alk. paper)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Dreams. I. Title. II. Series.

HD53.F74 2009

650.1–dc22

2008054462

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mark, Gretchen, and Rachel,

who have made all my dreams come true.

For my parents for giving me the time

and room to daydream.

For my family and friends for their

kindness and support.

For anyone who has ever been yelled at

for daydreaming.

For daydream believers everywhere.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

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

—T. E. LAWRENCE (Lawrence of Arabia), English soldier and author

Contents

Preface

I’ve always been fascinated by daydreams—what many psychologists believe to be our wellspring of creativity. I’ve wondered, especially in my teens and twenties, if I was unusual for daydreaming and if I daydreamed too much. I wondered what other people, including close friends and family, thought about as they stared dreamily out the window or off into that middle distance. I began wondering about the essence of daydreams. What are they exactly? And if we’re spending this much time doing it, why isn’t anyone talking about it? I find it odd that as a culture we have collectively ignored or hidden this significant aspect of our thinking, of ourselves. Is this the ultimate unexamined life?

Being curious, especially about things of a secretive nature, I began investigating. Then as fate would have it, my publisher asked me to write a book on creativity—and click—the two ideas fell together in a perfect bit of synchronicity, much like the random, free-associating nature of daydreaming itself.

As a writer and an editor, I have spent most of my adult life working with creative writers and know that writers and artists seem to understand intuitively the connection between daydreams and creativity. But creativity isn’t solely the province of artists, not by a long shot. The most successful people in any endeavor—whether business, science, athletics, or the arts—are visionaries. And what is a vision? At the end of the day, a vision is just an upscale word for daydream, and visionary an upscale word for daydreamer.

While most of us don’t have the ego to think of ourselves as visionaries experiencing grand moments of insight, we can all relate to having daydreams, and we can learn to mine these imaginative and spontaneous forays for their ideas and energy.

I find the energy-producing aspect of daydreaming especially compelling. People who are highly creative weave in and out of their daydreams the way other people breathe, regularly tapping into them not just for ideas but also for the motivation that keeps them pushing forward to make their vision a reality.

Those who need or want to be more creative in their life and work, or those who fear they aren’t creative at all, are neglecting a valuable resource if they are ignoring or downplaying the value of spontaneous thoughts and images.

This is especially true for those of us working to stay afloat or get ahead in the business world. It’s an understatement to say that the dynamics of business and industry have changed. In the agricultural and industrial ages, keeping on task was paramount. Stand around daydreaming too long and the crops might not get planted or a finger might get mangled in the machinery. But the information age and globalization have changed all that. We need to adapt or die—create or perish. Ideas are the new currency, and as such, everyone is in search of the next big (and little) thing that will keep us going.

This is why some companies are taking bold steps to spark innovation. Google, for example, gives key employees 20 percent of their work time to free think, to daydream, to come up with ideas. They understand that people need time and space to explore projects that fire their imagination.

Don’t get me wrong—focus is necessary, and there is a time for it. But humans don’t live by focus alone. To create, to discover, to follow the road around the bend, to get to that eureka moment, you’ve got to dream first.

This book is about opening a window on our most neglected and untapped source of creativity. Daydreaming is not a bad word, or a guilty pleasure, or a waste of time (despite what your teachers may have told you). And I hope that by reading this book, you will come to see daydreaming as a natural, beneficial, and even glorious human capacity, and most importantly, that you will learn how to tap into your daydreams for ideas, energy, and solutions you can use in your work and in your life.

After all, if we’re spending so much time daydreaming, it only makes sense to try to understand the process, and as such, I hope this book will be a solid start in that direction.

I started working on this project as a writing student in the master’s program at Johns Hopkins University. Over a number of years, I have extensively researched the topic and talked to and interviewed many people from psychologists to artists, athletes, scientists, entrepreneurs, and business executives to bring you the latest, most relevant information I can find. What you see now on paper, what you hold in your hand—all the research, facts, interviews, details, the hard-copy reality of this book—was once a mere daydream in my mind.

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted to those pioneering researchers of daydreaming who laid the foundation for the rest of us to begin understanding this complex and fascinating topic and who continue their work and exploration in this field—Eric Klinger, PhD, and Jerome Singer, PhD. I’m also indebted to the research and insights of Malia Mason, PhD and Dr. Nancy Andreasen, MD, as well as John S. Antrobus, PhD; Leonard Giambra, PhD; James M. Honeycutt, PhD; Gene Landrum, PhD; Robert Ornstein, PhD; Ethel Person, MD; and Jonathan Smallwood, PhD.

I’d also like to thank the many people I’ve interviewed for this book for their time and generosity of spirit—with a special thanks to Chana Anderson, Jeff Booth, Dan Brown, Tim Brown, Herta Feely, Paul Gibson, Eric Klinger, Will Koch, André Martin, Malia Mason, Erik Mueller, Richard Peabody, Jo Prabhu, Ed Viesturs, Ann Weisgarber, and Lauren Zander.

I am enormously grateful for the invaluable feedback and insights I received from readers of early drafts of the manuscript, especially Ruth Levy Guyer, Mark Eisenhower, Gretchen Eisenhower, Rachel Eisenhower, Rose Marie Fries, and Joan MacDonell.

Many thanks to my family and friends for their ongoing support and for sharing their own stories and experiences (special thanks to Beth Zarfoss for the gorilla video). I am also grateful to designer Kathleen Dyson and for the help and insights I received from Paul Dickson, Laura Fries, Jane Graf, Jenny Hughes, Dr. Mark Pettus, Nan S. Russell, Ann Weisgarber, and Jean Riescher Westcott. My profound thanks to my publisher Kathleen Hughes for giving me the opportunity to write this book and for providing invaluable assistance and advice every step of the way.

CHAPTER ONE

The Power of Daydreaming

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.

—JOHN LOCKE, seventeenth-century philosopher

Visionaries of every sort credit daydreams for creating conditions ripe for moments of insight to blossom.

Einstein, at the age of sixteen, pictured himself in a daydream traveling alongside a light beam, a bit of fanciful imagery that he later credited as the seed of his theory of relativity.

Mozart daydreamed about music on long walks through the countryside—imagined sounds that became the basis of famed compositions.

Walt Disney came up with the idea for a theme park while idly watching his daughters ride by on a merry-go-round.

Aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready watched a red-tailed hawk in flight and flashed on a concept that he used to build the first successful man-powered plane, the Gossamer Condor.

Though some have intuitively sensed the connection between daydreaming and creativity, recent scientific studies are combining with an abundance of anecdotal evidence to establish that when daydreaming, we are literally in our most creative state of mind, tapping into and connecting the most complex regions of the brain.

The beauty of daydreaming is that it’s a process available to every one of us. Yet many of us know relatively little about it. In our production-oriented, to-do-list world, we practically worship the focused, directed mind. We laud the pursuit of the quiet mind after wearing it out with the stress of incessant activity and striving. Yet we disparage our third state of mind, our most creative, imaginative, problem-solving, energizing, and entertaining mental state—the daydreaming mind.

The Engine of Your Imagination

Researchers say that everyone with an intact brain daydreams, and that the human mind spends a whopping 30 to 70 percent of its waking time in various states of mind wandering.

When you think about it, this significant amount of time we spend lost in thought isn’t that surprising. After all, we humans are a creative species. We get bored easily; our minds wander, and wander in imaginative ways that have moved us in a relatively short span of time from cave dwellers to websurfing, space-age globetrotters. It’s the ability to imagine that propels us. As such, daydreaming is both the engine that drives our imagination, and the nursery where ideas germinate.

Part of the problem in discussing daydreams, however, has been defining the term. Even psychologists and neurologists don’t have an exact definition but have loosely described the experience as spontaneous thoughts that occur when our awareness is separated from the task at hand or from our immediate physical environment. In those moments, we turn to an inner world. We can still drive or walk or wash dishes or scroll down the screen, but it’s as if we’re on automatic pilot or in a semi-trance. We’re not seeing the details of the real world anymore; we’re in an inward space, as if watching our own private movies.

These mind wanderings differ from directed, deliberate thought in that they are unintended. It’s thought that just pops into our head. We’re engaged in directed thought when we’re doing something very specific, say, working out a math problem—and our mind is rooted in the here and now as we focus on the details and the outcome.

Because daydreams are uncensored and free associating, they help us discover solutions that the focused mind, locked in its tunnel vision, can’t access. We’ve all had the experience in which we’ve been struggling to solve a problem. We’ve brainstormed and analyzed, and yet the answer never arrives. Then, as we’re doing something mindless like walking to the elevator or drifting off to sleep, the brain relaxes and moves into its daydreaming state, and the aha moment arrives unbidden.

In fact, when people use the phrase, I need to sleep on it, they probably mean they need to tuck it into the back of their mind and let it percolate and see what bubbles up—and when the answer does bubble up, it will be in a daydreaming state.

Yet the answer doesn’t magically come out of nowhere— the answer comes from the mind’s store of knowledge and experience—the daydreaming mind simply links it all together in ways the focused mind couldn’t envision.

There’s a video making the rounds on the Internet that shows the limitations of focus. In the experiment set up by two Harvard scientists, six students pass around a basketball. Half of them wear white shirts, the other half black. The viewers’ assignment: count the number of times the players in white shirts pass the ball to one another. At the end of the one-minute video, viewers give their score. What approximately half the viewers in this study missed as they were dutifully counting the number of passes was that a person dressed in a gorilla suit strode into the middle of the game, did a little shimmy, and moved on, all in flagrant view of the camera.

A friend sent me the video with instructions to count accurately, and I followed those directions exactly, eager to prove my worth as a basketball-passing counter. The result—I missed the gorilla completely. When I replayed it, sure enough, there it was. Right smack in the middle. But because I was so absorbed in completing my assigned task, I missed the obvious and ultimately far more relevant point.

Of course, we can miss the obvious when daydreaming as well. The point is we have different types of thought for a reason. One type isn’t inherently better than the other; but for some reason, we worship at the altar of focus while making daydreaming the crazy uncle in the attic.

It makes sense to learn to work our various levels of perception to the maximum advantage: to help us see the details when necessary, to take a step back and observe the larger scene so we don’t miss the gorillas among us, and to step back even farther in our daydreams and conceptualize those gorillas yet to be seen.

Unfortunately, too many of us have been ingrained to think that daydreaming is a time-squandering, silly, even embarrassing activity—rather than the incredibly useful human talent that it is. What other species has the capacity to imagine, to dive in and out of the past and future, to simulate events, even to envision things that are out of the realm of what seems possible?

This ability to see images in our daydreams—to visualize, model, and replicate the known and unknown—is an unrivaled human capacity in terms of its application to creativity. To get the idea of what visual imagery is, try this simple exercise pointed out to me by daydream and mental imagery expert Eric Klinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who in turn got the example from psychologist Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927)—stop and mentally count the windows in your house.

Notice what you’ve done—you’ve either visualized each room in your mind’s eye as you sought to count the windows or you’ve visualized the house from the outside. You are visually seeing and counting something without literally seeing the object.

Though we all have the capacity to visualize, people vary tremendously in how vivid that imagery is, says Klinger. Einstein, for instance, relied heavily on his ability to visualize during his daydreaming states, which he referred to as thought experiments, even claiming that he valued his visualizations over actual laboratory experiments.

Over the years, writes Walter Isaacson in Einstein: His Life and Universe, he would picture in his mind such things as lightning strikes and moving trains, accelerating elevators and falling painters, two-dimensional blind beetles crawling on curved branches, as well as a variety of contraptions designed to pinpoint, at least in theory, the locations and velocity of speeding electrons.

Though mainly visual, daydreams can also involve the other senses—sound, touch, taste, and smell. Musicians, for example, tend to have daydreams in which they hear music, which for composers serves as the starting point of a composition—ala Mozart in the opening example.

When Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Harvey Hubbell V (Loop Dreams and Dislecksia: The Movie) describes how he makes movies in his head in an article in the New York Times, he says, ‘I would close my eyes and see pictures. I’d hear music, too—like from a marching band or something—and I knew right where it should come in.’ Though Hubbell was one of those school kids who was always getting yelled at for daydreaming, he credits this gift as the basis for his success as a filmmaker.

While the ability to experience imagery in daydreaming is critical to creativity, it’s not the only reason daydreaming is such an innovation-inspiring state of mind. The uncensored aspect of daydreaming is also priceless in that it gives us both the means and the freedom to explore, without an internal critic hovering over us, second-guessing or disparaging every thought. What happens in your daydreams, stays in your daydreams, unless you choose to share. You own them, nobody sees them, no one is grading them, and in that way you are free to try out any number of concepts that might not be ready for prime time.

The ability to free associate while daydreaming is yet another critical link to inspiration. I know we’ve all had the experience of not being able to find the right word, it’s on the tip of the tongue, but we just can’t get it. Then for seemingly no reason, it pops into our mind and we shout it out, often in front of bewildered colleagues or strangers.

Any number of external prompts can trigger associations and related mind wanderings. Say, you’re driving along and you see something that reminds you of something else, and your mind takes off down the proverbial rabbit hole. At a red light, while staring off into space, I catch a glimpse of an ice cream stand from the corner of my eye and say aloud to my husband, We need to get your Mom a birthday present.

Sometimes a place or thing will launch a distinct memory, a flashback complete with visual images, maybe even sounds, or a sense of touch. When I see the Rolling Stones’ logo of that impudent tongue sticking out of lush red lips, I am instantly back in a high school classroom doodling that logo over and over on lined notebook paper, the opening twangy notes of Honky Tonk Woman somewhere in the background. That logo is emblematic of