Everyone with an intact brain daydreams, and the human mind spends a whopping 30 to 70 per cent of its waking time in various states of mind wandering, writes Amy Fries in ‘ Daydreams at Work: Wake up your creative powers ’ (www.macmillanpublishersindia.com).
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 web-surfing, space-age globetrotters, she adds. “It’s the ability to imagine that propels us… Daydreaming is both the engine that drives our imagination, and the nursery where ideas germinate.”
Artists have always been the most loyal fans of daydreaming, observes Fries, in a chapter on daydreams at work in the arts. For instance, “Fiction writing requires getting into an altered state and diving head first into the deep end of another world, emerging only when you have to snap back to reality…The ability to imagine deeply with all five senses has been called the ‘theatre of the mind.”
Daydreams work in science, too. Creative scientists seem to be alert and open to work-related associations that come to them in a daydreaming state, Fries notes. “There are quite a few stories of scientists experiencing light-bulb moments, in which they suddenly get a clear view of the answer or at least the right path to follow.”
She is of the view that these ‘aha’ moments are not a bolt from the blue, coming from a void, spilling their secrets into an empty vessel; but rather they are ‘a bolt from the stew – the thoughts and experiences and stores of empirical knowledge that an individual has been collecting and developing over the years, but which link up in novel and illuminating ways while in a daydreaming state.’
A chapter on daydreams at work in business, identifies physical spaces that can stifle creativity. The first is the drab, I-don’t-care office space that comes from beige walls, wilting plants, and out-of-date magazines piling up in reception areas – the type of place you walk into and immediately think ‘this feels like a prison,’ the author describes.
“The second creativity-killing interior can be the overly slick and industrially decorated – the kind of place with hushed hallways and deadly silent cubicles, where you feel that if you laughed, stumbled, or spilled a drop of coffee you would automatically be ejected by some unseen force.”
Why should businesses that want to present a polished imaged be so hermetically sealed, she wonders. “An overly finished, overly stylised office can send a creativity-killing message to employees that says – you are not part of the company-building process, in fact the company is already built and finished, you are just a cog in the wheel required to keep the established juggernaut rolling.”
Fries urges the individual employee to own his or her right to dream, because creativity is valued and increasingly expected in our volatile world. To those who want to move ahead, her advice is simple: Start thinking creatively about your field and start pitching ideas, without waiting around for your boss or someone else to assign you the job of coming up with better ways to do things.
“Just start doing it. Be attentive to your daydreams and associations, write them down as soon as you can, keep a record, explore and develop those that seem worthy, and then communicate them when you’re ready.”
Recommended study.
