A while ago a friend hosted a meetup about daydreaming and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am reflecting and sharing my thoughts:
- Daydreaming as a window to understand oneself:
Daydream tells the person about his desires and what he wishes for. An experiment we did was to try and imagine what the cashier was daydreaming about, with different perspectives the general feeling was that people imagined how they would feel if they were in his place. They projected their values and preferences on the cashier as they thought.
- Daydreaming as tool for empathy:
Another experiment that revolved around try to imagine other people’s daydream in the meetup. We knew little about each other but not absolutely nothing (what differentiated it from the previous experiment). This engaged us in trying to analyze and understand the other person’s priorities and what makes them who they are.
- Influencing and inspiring others through daydreaming:
I remembered what Steve Jobs told the CEO of Pepsi to get him to go to apple. He invoked his daydreaming part of his brain and it effectively changed his plans and made him join apple. Stories –or dreams- that people can project themselves to be a part of are the perfect tool for that. That is what inspiration and influence are all about.
- Daydreaming cannot be force started, it is primed:
We tried to daydream, and everyone thought it was really impossible. I managed to do it because I choose a starting point, my desire. This prompted to try an experiment where I spoke of general triggers for wishes and dreams, didn’t engage in eye contact and spoke slowly and softly, and it was a success. People managed to daydream and that might help us in understand our selves more by understanding what triggers invoked the daydream.
- Daydreaming is the minds simulator of ideas:
This blew my mind at first, the creative part of the brain generated the ideas but the “Default network”, part of the brain responsible for daydreaming, was the part that was engaged afterwards. I believe based on experiences and imagination it ran simulations for the ideas to understand if they would make sense or not. Developing AI might make use of this mechanism somehow.
