PASSAGE 2
1. Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one’s immediate surroundings, during which a
person’s contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially
one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced
while awake. There are many types of daydreams, and there is no relied definition amongst
psychologists, however the characteristic that is common to all forms of daydreaming meets the
criteria for mild dissociation.
2. Negative aspects of daydreaming begun to be stressed after human work became dictated by the
motion of the tool. As many works did not allow for any creativity, no place was left for positive
aspects of daydreaming. It not only became associated with laziness, but also with danger. For
example, in the late 19th century, some educational psychologists warned parents not to let their
children daydream, for fear that the children may be sucked into “neurosis and even psychosis”
3. Humanistic psychology, on the other hand, found numerous examples of people in creative or
artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas through
daydreaming. Similarly, research scientists, and mathematicians have developed new ideas by
daydreaming about their subject areas.
4. Therapist Dan Jones looked at patterns in how people achieved success from entrepreneurs like
Richard Branson and Peter Jones to geniuses like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. Jones
also looked at the thinking styles of successful creative like Beethoven and Walt Disney. What he
found was that they all had one thing in common. They all spent time daydreaming about their area
of success.
5. Research by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has found that people who experience vivid
dream-like mental images reserve the word for these, whereas many other people when then they
talk about “daydreaming” refer to milder imagery, realistic future planning, review of past
memories, or just “spacing out”.
6. Nowadays it is understood that visualization or guided imagery is the same state of mind as
daydreaming. Some pieces of research also show that daydreaming may lead the daydreamer to get
internally calm and to over the tensions he has gotten recently. Psychologists now believe that a
daydreamer may come to know the fact that getting tension if a daydream come to his mind he will
be able to achieve calmness, he at his own will repeat the process of daydreaming to overcome the
tension.