{"id":74,"date":"2015-10-07T08:00:56","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/projects.nyujournalism.org\/dormancy\/?page_id=74"},"modified":"2015-10-10T14:48:58","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T14:48:58","slug":"dancing-with-daydreams","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/projects.nyujournalism.org\/dormancy\/drifting\/dancing-with-daydreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing with Daydreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Shannon Hall<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/em><\/p>\n

The hour approached 4 a.m. as I sat on a small mat with my legs crossed and my feet overlapping opposite knees. Despite the encompassing darkness, the air was hot and sticky, and the forest was far from quiet. Cicadas screamed in the background and geckos croaked from the temple\u2019s corners. My eyes were closed in meditation, but my mind was in flux.<\/p>\n

\"636\"<\/a>I was living in a Buddhist temple deep in the forests of Northeast Thailand. Every day I slept little, ate only one meal and meditated for hours on end. It may sound incredibly boring for some, but I had a dirty, little secret: I was looking forward to meditation, not because I wanted to let my thoughts go, but because I wanted to selfishly collect my thoughts. I craved time to let my mind wander.<\/p>\n

Michael Kane, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, defines mind wandering as \u201cconscious thoughts that are unrelated to the person\u2019s ongoing task or activity.\u201d Most of the time when people fall into mind wandering they are thinking about every day concerns, such as items on their to-do list.<\/p>\n

Kane and his colleague Jennifer McVay asked 72 U.N.C. students<\/a> to carry Palm Pilots that beeped at random intervals eight times a day for a week. When the subjects heard the beep they were asked to analyze whether or not they were actually on task. About 30 percent of the time, the student\u2019s thoughts were unrelated to the task at hand. Mind wandering is remarkably common.<\/p>\n

And although it often gets a bad reputation, mind wandering can be quite useful.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine you\u2019re a student in a class,\u201d Kane said. \u201cWhat if the goal of reading or understanding or even performing well on a test doesn\u2019t rank as highly for you as figuring out how you\u2019re going to repair the relationship with your mom, or thinking through how you\u2019re going to have enough money to pay the rent at the end of the month?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes we simply need a moment to stop and think. And in the demanding schedules common in today\u2019s world \u2014 especially among college students \u2014 that moment often comes while we\u2019re trying to perform another task.<\/p>\n

\"black-holes-cartoon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The years leading up to my trip to Thailand had been a daze of classes, exams and work. Like every other college student, I had made enough mistakes to analyze for years to come. It had been so long since I had a moment to sit down and think through a problem. I wanted to peer inside my noisy mind, pick up each thought and sew it into a perfectly crafted quilt of thoughts. So I traveled over 7,000 miles to that temple.<\/p>\n

It did not take long, however, before I realized I had made a tragic mistake.<\/p>\n

Ajahn Chah, the founder of the temple I was living in, once said<\/a>: \u201cMeditation does not simply involve being in peace with the world. On the contrary, confronting the self can be like walking into a raging storm.\u201d Indeed, experienced meditators often comment on just how hard that first month of meditation can be. Suppressed thoughts boil up to the surface and the person you\u2019ve carefully crafted as \u201cyou\u201d is lost within them.<\/p>\n

I quickly noticed just how often my thoughts returned to the same place. There was no clear solution to my past mistakes and there was no lesson to be learned from them. I would never be able to design that perfect quilt of thoughts.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I left mind wandering behind and turned to mindfulness meditation. With my breath as an anchor, the wild thoughts in my head melted away.<\/p>\n

But I quickly wondered (outside of meditation, of course) if I had such a negative reaction to mind wandering because I was so focused on the past. Unfortunately, little research has been done on the temporal elements of mind wandering. \u201cYou might imagine that thinking about the past can be useful in some ways if we don\u2019t want to repeat the mistakes that we made,\u201d explained\u00a0Kane, who also argues that it can be harmful because what\u2019s done is done. This certainly echoed my personal revelation.<\/p>\n

You also might imagine that thinking about the future can be \u201chelpful as a kind of testing out, simulating different courses of action you might take about a problem.\u201d Indeed, daydreaming (which some researchers place in a broader category than mind wandering) is often thought of as the ability to access unconscious ideas hovering beneath the surface. According to psychologist Jonathon Schooler from the University of California, Santa Barbara, mind wandering can lead to creativity.<\/p>\n

This idea rings true for many artists and scientists. Albert Einstein pictured himself running<\/a> along a light wave, a daydream that led to his theory of special relativity. Kary Mullis came up with DNA replication while he was driving<\/a> through the mountains on a cold, California night. And Henri Poincar\u00e9 solved a mathematical theorem while stepping<\/a> onto a bus.<\/p>\n

In a 2012 study<\/a>, Schooler and his colleagues presented 145 undergraduate students with a rather odd task: They had to list as many uses as possible for everyday objects like a brick, toothpick or clothes hanger. Some participants received a 12-minute break, where he or she engaged in an undemanding activity known to elicit mind wandering. (Other participants rested completely or didn\u2019t get a break at all). But the participants whose minds were able to wander performed 41 percent better than the others. It seemed that mind wandering and creativity come hand in hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it would be a grave mistake if people were to just remove the capacity for day dreaming from the mental toolkit,\u201d said Schooler.<\/p>\n

But Kane stands firm that whether or not mind wandering causes happiness or distress greatly depends on the situation at hand. \u201cWe probably can\u2019t boil this stuff down into good or bad, positive or negative, useful or not useful, in any kind of blanket terms,\u201d Kane said. Instead, it all boils down to context.<\/p>\n

So Schooler suggests a balance<\/a> between mindfulness and mind wandering. He recommends that we build times during the day to engage in mind wandering. You never know what you might discover while mowing the lawn, doing the dishes or carpooling to and from work. But Schooler also recommends that we develop a strategy of checking in \u2014 what he calls meta-awareness \u2014 when we\u2019re engaging in demanding tasks to make sure that we\u2019re fully present.<\/p>\n

\"123_2400_Width_1_MB\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Many years have come and gone since I lived in that temple. I have since moved to New York City \u2014 a madhouse that overwhelms every one of my senses 24\/7 \u2014 and I now crave time to once again collect my thoughts. So today I allow my weary mind time to wander, often during my three hour daily commutes to and from the city. There I dip into myself so that I can wrestle with that raging storm.<\/p>\n

Then once I\u2019m home I sit on my living room\u2019s hardwood floor in full lotus position, take a deep breath in and revere the silence.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

All photos were shot by myself on my trip to Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand.<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Shannon Hall — The hour approached 4 a.m. as I sat on a small mat with my legs crossed and my feet overlapping opposite knees. Despite the encompassing darkness, the air was hot and sticky, and the forest was far from quiet. Cicadas screamed in the background and geckos croaked from the temple\u2019s corners. 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