Creativity And Daydreaming | The Great Acting Blog

“Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other 22 in dreams.” – Luis Bunuel.

If you, like me, were bored out of your skull when you were at school, especially during double geography on a Friday afternoon, then you probably spent most of your time gazing out of the window daydreaming, until you were rudely interrupted by the teacher with an inane question about mudslides. I’ve often thought that daydreaming is basically what we call “creativity”, it’s where we invent and imagine things, and a recent article seems to confirm my view.

During the 1970s, psychologist Jerome L Singer published The Inner World Of Daydreaming, widely regarded as the pre-eminent text on our understanding of the role that the subconscious plays in creativity. In it he posited a correlation between the frequency with which somebody daydreamed and their levels of creativity and storytelling activity. He also defined positive constructive daydreaming as the largely conflict-free form of daydreaming, which involves playful, vivid imagery.

The article informs us that Singer’s work has been revisited, and new insights have been found about how positive contructive daydreaming can be beneficial:

“Individuals can choose to disengage from external tasks, decoupling attention, in order to pursue an internal stream of thought that they expect to pay off in some way. The pay off may be immediate, coming in the form of pleasing reverie, insight, or new synthesis of material or it may be more distant as in rehearsing upcoming scenarios or projecting oneself forward in time to a desired outcome”.

And:

“Choosing to disengage from external tasks, decouple, turn attention inward, and follow an internal stream of thought with full awareness undoubtedly requires skill…But the more a person does it, the easier it is likely to become.”

In my view, anyone could become an artist because everyone daydreams, regardless of their line of work or position within a culture. However, those who actually go on to become artists do so because they turn this daydreaming, this creativity, into a skill – in short, they learn to shift between their internal and external worlds deliberately, using technique. Technique is learned through study and practice over time, those who do more of it, get better at it and enjoy a stronger creative output.

Perhaps then, those kids, bored at school, are not wasting their time by gazing out of the window, daydreaming. Perhaps they are taking the first tentative steps on their journey toward becoming an artist.

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