The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another – William James
Have you ever heard the phrase, stream of consciousness? This was first coined by the father of modern psychology in America by William James. In one of his works, he had a chapter dedicated to this concept. The idea is that we always have some kind of conscious thought going on. There is always a flow of feelings, impulses, knowledge, reactions, considerations, and other thoughts flowing through our minds. He called them fields of consciousness, and his point was that the mind will always wander in and out of these constantly. The point is that you cannot prevent this, it is the way the mind works. You were born a wanderer.
No one knows this better than a practitioner of mindful meditation. They refer to this concept called, “the monkey mind.” Many people that practice meditation work on trying to slowly encourage the mind to become focused on the present moment, the current state rather then to jump around all over the place. I have noticed that you can get better, training your mind to follow a certain stream, but you cannot get your mind not to flow thoughts. That always happens, no matter what. If you take a walk around the block, for example, go alone and do not bring any music or a phone. Just walk around and look at things, note what happens. Your mind will wander, seemingly without purpose.
We have negatively labeled this as “day dreaming.” However, it has gotten bad rapport. Day Dreaming, as it turns out, is a very powerful and natural state for us to be in. If you do not like the term day dreaming, call it something more hip. Such as mind wandering, or even mind mapping. The important point is that you can and should allow the mind to wander. William James’ taught it was essential to understand this, and to cultivate this as a natural way that we as humans process the world around us.
Last year I engaged in an experiment to build a large 100 room mind map that I would use to store things that I wanted to commit to long term memory. As I did so and the mind map came together, I was able to visualize connections that occurred naturally in my mind. As I did so, I found it easier to store and retrieve things that I was trying to memorize. For example, I found that I could memorize the first 400 digits of PI rather easily. You might think that I was a mentally disturbed person when I recall how JFK is strangling Marilyn Monroe with a Python like snake in my Grandmother’s kitchen. However, that location now holds a few things that I have memorized, most likely forever, including the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th digit of PI. 62 – 64. You see in the refrigerator of this room, Queen Cersei from the Game of Thrones is PUNCHING a bottle of Mustard in the stomach. 62 is my number for Cersei and 64 is an action that Gregore Clegane takes (punching people).
Now all of that sounds nuts, I am sure. However, it is my mind and my stream of consciousness that created that scenario. It is natural for me, it flows well, for reasons that I cannot explain. I am not going to fight that, I embrace it. Now I have a very powerful memory mnemonic. This is a result of understanding how the brain flows from thought to thought, and it is indeed very powerful and for that reason I unequivocally claim that Day Dreaming is not bad. In fact, it should be encouraged. You should take time out of your work day, get away from your current job and just allow your mind to wander for a spell. You will be more effective during this time period than any other period of the day.
This is called Positive Constructive Day Dreaming (PCD). Look it up, I am not making this up! There is active research going on this right now. We should stop fighting day dreaming and encourage it, especially in young people. How often have we exclaimed, stop day dreaming and get back to work! We need to realize that active day dreaming is a sign of a maturing, well organized mind. I daresay, and I am paraphrasing some of the research on this topic, that successful people are probably people that learned to actively day dream as children.
Telling a child to stop day dreaming is one thing we can do to harm the positive part of this developmental exercise. However, there are others we do to harm ourselves as adults as well. The first is that of filling our days full of tasks and not account for the need of some quality day dreaming time. That is right, I said it. It is acceptable for you to put down your work, take a walk around the hallways or outside and just let your brain wander freely and without the annoying distraction of being required to meet a deadline or respond to someone. Every minute of the day does not need to be filled to the brim. You do not need to have every second of every day filled with maniacal caffeinated task completion to be effective. This is a myth, it is more likely that the persons that take time to themselves, allow themselves space to think and find time to daydream are the ones that are actually effective.
In addition to overwhelming ourselves with being slaves to the to do list, we also tend to beat our minds into submission by filling in the blanks with other people’s thoughts. We stream Katy Perry or Mary J. Blige through headphones, or fill our minds with images coming from Tiger King or Stranger Things to avoid the awful of experience of nothing. The time when you have no agenda, just time to sit and do nothing. The time when, heaven forbid, that our minds just wander. Who knows what our adult mind might wander into when left alone? We might, uh oh get ready for it, think of what is really important in life! We might remind ourselves of what we really want to be, or become. We might feel guilty for bad things we have done or are going to do. We might actually wander our way into making an improvement in our lives! Nah! I would rather swipe through news articles, or social media posts anything but that (sarcasm noted).
I side with the part of the research that indicates that mind wandering is a good thing. This is not failure, this the art of sailing. Allowing the mind to wander through the caves of uncertainty, to explore the boundaries of the unknown and to fly away on the cloud of future success. Our vision of the future is born on the wings of the day dreaming mind. Day dreaming is not about losing yourself to fantasy, or wasteful adventures, or the cistern of temporal impulse. You can turn this into a positive thing, you can become the artist, the one with the paint brush that helps and assists your mind into a constructive adventure.
This is called, Positive Constructive Day Dreaming. Go head, block out time on your calendar right now. Call it PCD. This is something you practice, it takes time to be good. You can learn to use this time to formulate plans, articulate your ambitions, solve problems, figure out the root cause of a contentious issue. There are no rules, sorry, I cannot teach you. What I do, is take long walks and talk to myself. I mutter and mumble through scenarios in my mind like some disturbed soul doomed to wander the streets. I allow myself a certain amount of time to allow my mind to wander in and around the edges of what it is I am pondering. Sometimes I go right at the heart of the matter, sometimes I dance in and out of the edges of the concern. Many times, I pretend that I giving a speech about how I solved this problem to a large audience. What would I say? I create fictional role plays and I imagine what I would do, what I would say, how I would act. I let my mind wander though these with a fluid motion. I do not hold myself to that constraint, if it is not natural, then I let my mind go after what it sees. Sure, I have to reel myself back in now and then, but most the time after a few minutes I find something to chase and then things really start to come together.
PCD is where I have launched my greatest ideas, where I have incubated my most precious dreams. I have written books, given great speeches and slayed horrible dragons. I find this time the most precious and most valuable part of my day. I highly encourage you to remove the negative label that Day Dreaming has had and find the time to schedule in the ability to wander.
After all, the wanderer is the hero in every great story that I have ever read.
Guy Reams
Further Reading
