A post by Adriana Alcaraz Sánchez

We tend to say that someone who is daydreaming is distracted, thinking about something else, absorbed in their own musings. We use the term to characterise the experience of being absorbed in our own (inner) world. But what is daydreaming exactly?

The experience of daydreaming has been extensively addressed in the psychological literature. Yet, more traditional research in this area has largely conflated daydreaming with “mind wandering” and both terms have been used to denote episodes of task-unrelated thought (Klinger, 2008; Singer, 1975). In the more traditional sense, daydreaming is understood similarly to our common-sense definition—as episodes of distraction. Given this conflation, some authors have attempted to change this trend by emphasising the distinctive features of daydreaming that make it different from mind wandering, such as its imagistic nature as well as its more agential character and purpose (Dorsch, 2015; Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018).

More relevant to the purposes of this piece, other authors have argued that daydreaming is not like any other kind of waking imagination (including any form of visualisation, planning, or supposition), but that it is more akin to nighttime dreaming. According to these authors, daydreams, like dreams, involve a sense of being in an imagined world—an “imaginative immersive experience” (Lawson & Thompson, 2024). Some have noted the hybrid nature of daydreaming as an experience that “lies between wakefulness and sleep. It has one foot in the actual world and another foot in the dream world” (Geniusas, 2023:49). Similarly, dreams have also been regarded as particularly intensified and immersive imaginative experiences (Windt, 2020).

One question arising from these views stressing the dream-like nature of daydreaming is: to what extent does daydreaming involve an experience of dreaming while awake? Here, I want to motivate a positive answer to this question by examining a relatively newfound phenomenon focus of recent interest in clinical psychology: the case of maladaptive daydreaming (MD; Somer, 2002).