The Case for Daydreaming
Why our best ideas seem to strike when we stop trying
I used to be afraid of 3 a.m.
The shadows in the corner of my bedroom would arch towards the ceiling and hang over me like a spectre. With every squinted gaze they would morph into another terrifying creature ready to pull me into the underbelly of the darkness. As a child, I would reach for my nearest stuffed animal and find comfort in the matted threads that told the tales of an anxious little girl.
It wasn’t until years later that I would come to understand that the moonlight wasn’t actually waking me for torment, but for opportunity.
In the still of a darkened room at night, when the world is a quiet whisper, our brains easily slip into daydreaming, connecting ideas, and even replaying memories (especially the embarrassing ones). This is in part due to the activation of a circuit in our brain known as the Default Mode Network - but I more intuitively call it our Discovery Domain. My 8-year-old mind, at night, would wander towards threat and turn shadows into goblins. Over time, however, the midnight hours would become fertile ground for my greatest creative pursuits.
Late one night, during my undergraduate studies at McMaster University, I awoke to beautiful words lapping on the shores of my thoughts:
I rest my fingers on your tired hands in secret compensation
as 8 letters crawl up my throat and rest on my tongue in momentary hesitation
I..I..I love you grandma
but I hate myself for not being able to tell you in more ways than one.
Where is my journal? I thought, as this full poetic stanza teetered on the edge of my mind, threatening to dissolve into oblivion. I wrote it down hastily, followed by a few more stanzas that seemed to pour out of me like tea through the spout of a teapot. No longer did I simply feel like a poet (who had been writing poetry since I was six), but a conduit, from some other creative realm into our world. By daybreak, the poem was half-complete, and by the following twilight, it was finished. A bittersweet love letter to my maternal grandmother, who I had lost to cancer when I was 10 years old.
Soon, I would learn that this lightning bolt of poetic creativity wouldn’t strike only once. Many times, over the ensuing years, my best poems would start out as fully formed stanzas that would find me when I was least expecting it: nudging me awake at night, surprising me in the shower, or even while pushing a stroller through the park.
The thing is, this phenomenon has less to do with magic and more to do with science.
Graham Wallas, an English social psychologist, explored the four stages of creativity in his 1926 book The Art of Thought. My own creative process maps onto his framework.
Preparation: Writing, especially poetry, has always been the way I process my inner and outer world. A decade of grieving my maternal grandmother, and metabolizing that grief, gave me the necessary raw materials within which my creative process could germinate.
Incubation: Our brains continue to nurture this creativity even when we consciously step away from active effort. Most fascinatingly, during sleep, our brains link distant thoughts and memories to current ideas; reorganizing and creating invisible, associative strings. Ullrich Wagner and Jan Born (2004) found that sleep more than doubled participants’ chances of discovering hidden insight. This expands on why my moments of quietude (sleeping, showering, strolling through the park) set my mind up for creative breakthroughs.
Illumination: The lightning bolt, the strike of creativity, the “AHA!” moment of finally solving the riddle, or finding the elusive solution. Wallas called this the “flash”. Modern neuroscience, including the work of John Kounios and Mark Beeman, details this phenomenon as connection forming unconsciously, suddenly breaking into consciousness all at once. For me, this took the shape of poetry seemingly pouring out of my mind “from another realm”, when in reality, it was actually percolating in the background all along, waiting for the defenses to fall.
Verification: We rein in our wandering minds and bring focus to amorphous creative energy. Contemporary research has found that highly creative people have strong interconnectivity between their daydreaming network and focus network (which I call the Discovery and Decision Domains). My half-written poems took their final form within a day because I harnessed my wandering creativity and channelled it into my writing.
And, yes, like most things that beguile me in this life, these “lightning bolts of creativity” exist at the intersection of art and science. Most importantly, they invite us to slow down, seek rest, and let our minds wander.
But…is all wandering equal?
As a resident psychiatrist, I have seen the hazards of an unchecked, wandering mind. I’ve sat across from patients who struggle with debilitating anxiety, marked by a ruminating mind (stuck wandering; anxiety fixated on a particular worry, regret, or memory). This mirrors my 8-year-old self, when my mind latched onto shadow-goblins and wouldn’t shake loose the fear for hours. This is the kind of wandering that we would ideally want to avoid.
Instead, Yale psychologist Jerome Singer suggested that we lean into ‘positive constructive daydreaming’. This occurs when we let our minds wander with intentional, playful, future-facing curiosity. The natural outcome of this state is a brain primed to make connections, which is the milieu necessary for those creative breakthroughs.
If you’re wondering whether your wandering mind is in a ruminative or daydreaming state, ask yourself: does this feel light, playful, and curious, or does it feel heavy and cyclical? These questions will help you discern what is really happening inside your remarkable brain.
So - will you join me in daydreaming?
Okay, I know, easier said than done. In a world that praises and rewards hyper-productivity, taking a moment to relish idle time can be perceived as “lazy” or “lacking focus”. Many of us (myself included) may struggle to sit with our own thoughts for extended periods of time - often turning on a podcast, or music, or show to avoid the silence. But remember, these moments of incubation are exactly what our brains need for creative ideas to ripen.
Ultimately, I challenge you to reframe daydreaming as a skill that needs to be honed. This week, go on a ten-minute walk outdoors without your phone and let your mind wander. Or, maybe, take ten minutes to write down your biggest, most audacious dreams, without any limitations.
You never know what magic lies on the other side of “what if”, or the ingenuity that is simmering just beneath the surface.
This is why I will always keep a journal and pen on my bedside table, ready for the 3 a.m. poetry.