Daydreaming Meditation

 (The plan? Each month, I try a new philosophical exercise! In the previous episode, we explored Soji: Zen Housework without Hope)

    By and large, mindfulness meditation instructions urge us to stop daydreaming in order to go back to the present moment. At most, we are encouraged to take stock of where the mind has wandered, while we gently go back to our actual sensations. But what would happen if instead we decided to stay there and to be mindful of those daydreams? It is the question that James Morley asks in his article “Meditation, Lucidity, and the Phenomenology of Daydreaming”¹. And testing his hypothesis is what I did this month (May 2024).

    James Morley provides a handy framework to think about the phenomenon of daydreaming. First of all, he describes what triggers the event. Typically, what happens is that we are undergoing a feeling that we cannot adequately express in the present situation. For instance, we experience anger about a political situation, but there is nothing to do about it in the moment, and so we fantasize about giving a political speech somewhere where this would be appropriate (at a press conference for example, or in front of someone who just perpetrated a political injustice). Second of all, he describes how daydreaming happens (based on interviewing people about their daydreaming experience). People seem to undergo a split, where their experience is split between three points of view.

    The first point of view is that of the habitual self, which goes on auto-pilot. Let’s say the reason why you could do nothing about a political situation is because you were driving your car alone, with nobody to talk to. As your mind wanders and you begin daydreaming, you do not stop driving the car. You keep driving the car as if your body were on auto-pilot. You might be surprised to find yourself arriving at your destination suddenly, since your mind was busy daydreaming while your habitual self kept driving surprisingly competently.

    The second point of view is that of the Actor who plays the role in the fantasy: the person who gives the speech, for example. This gives you the agency that was lacking in real life, you are free to act on your emotion.

    The third point of view is perhaps the trickiest one to spot and to describe. It is that of the Audience/Director (as in a “movie director/audience” or something like that ; Morley calls it the “directing spectator”). It is the point of view that dictates what happens in the fantasy scenario, enjoying how it unfolds. Its role is to manage both the habitual self and the Actor in order to protect and prolong the life of the daydream. For example, if you fantasize while out and about, the Director might decide to take a longer detour in order to keep on daydreaming (let’s call that “protecting” the daydream). But another example, that I find more interesting, is that the Director might “prolong” the life of the daydream through creative choices. For instance, the Director might throw in additional obstacles and challenges for the hero of the story to overcome, because if the story comes to a resolution too soon, then the feeling to be expressed is no longer adequately catered to. Perhaps the hypothetical journalists at this hypothetical press conference might ask very challenging questions of our hero, who has to answer them eloquently. The Daydream is then spent refining those hard questions and refining those brilliant answers. You can imagine how as an Audience, we also have stakes in the feelings of those hypothetical journalists. The journalists at this phantasmagorical press conference might feel admiration or disdain for your character, and in a way, as an Actor, you are also playing their parts. You are split between several characters.

    I think that the end goal here would be to become more and more mindful of the Director/Audience point of view. It is very easy to feel that the fantasy “simply happens to you”. If you uncover this active dimension, on the contrary, you can fully appreciate your participation in it. You are not just a passive audience, you are a directing force. And you are not emotionally invested just in your character, you are in fact “puppeteering” all the characters “on screen”, and feeling their emotions. Hatred, thus, might be self-hatred, for example, and it is good to uncover that. I don’t think that the goal is to force yourself to have wiser fantasies through influencing the Director’s job directly. That would feel forced and inauthentic. It would not lead to discovery. The goal is simply to observe what is going on, and to see the “itch” that the fantasy is “scratching” without hasty judgment about the lack of wisdom of the fantasy.

    Personally, this exercise allowed me to understand myself better by giving me a high-definition view of what I am attempting to do in the role of the Director. It allowed me to feel the motivation behind the creative choices that shape my fantasies. Let me give you an example. I have this fantasy where I’m a famous author. Pretty standard. I didn’t think much of it: I have ambitions as an author, and fame is a flashy (if inadequate) way to measure success. I indulged in this fantasy from time to time, while disapproving of its core message. It’s “naughty”, let’s say, but it seemed benign enough. Thanks to the “Daydreaming Meditation” exercise, I managed to have a better view of the structure of this fantasy, and I think it has interesting implications for my life. Here’s what a typical scene looks like in that fantasy: I am a famous author, but I don’t give interviews…Mysterious!... except! I agree to give an interview to this one interviewer I like… They ask me why I never give interviews, remarking on how unusual it is: I am evasive in my answer, but they manage to get some answers out of me… “I don’t want to be famous, but here we are”… One way to read this fantasy is to say what the French would say “je fais mon intéressant”, which roughly means “to make a spectacle of yourself” or “to make oneself look interesting”. And I mean, yeah, on one level of analysis that’s correct, but it’s important not to move on too quickly, as this would produce only superficial knowledge of my desires. Why do I like to see myself as famous but mysterious?

    Upon doing the exercise it struck me how the structure of my fantasy is very reminiscent of a great quote “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found” (D.W. Winnicott). As the Director of this fantasy, I am forced to go back and forth between two desires: the desire to be hidden and the desire to be found. It is a great tension, reminiscent of the game of hide and seek: you want to be hidden in an interesting way, which makes it difficult to find you, but you want people to admire your clever choice, and so it has to be revealed to them in some way. Upon realizing that this is the crux of my fantasy, I immediately was able to see the link between these desires, this core tension, and the way I handled some creative projects in the past. More specifically, I was able to understand why I mishandled those projects. In brief, here’s what happened: I saw other creative projects successfully handling this hidden & found dynamic (they had very interesting stuff to say but you had to meet them halfway), I was dazzled by their beauty, and so, as an Author, I copied their surface level characteristics without understanding what I was trying to emulate. Imitating the surface level characteristics of those works and not their core drive was a disaster! And so these projects failed. Had I understood the logic behind my choices I might have been able to course-correct by adapting my desire to my actual circumstances, as opposed to imitating without thought.

    The thing is, the desire catered to by the Director is probably not an ugly desire to have, but when it is unacknowledged it works as a chaotic compass that gets attracted by anything remotely magnetic. It can get quite ugly. You end up being attracted to anything that remotely resembles what you’re going for. On the contrary, once your desire is acknowledged and understood, it can act as a true compass. As James Morley suggests in passing, his proposal, in a way, is that Freud’s Dream Censor is not this fully Unconscious thing that cannot be accessed², except through indirect detective work (psychoanalysis). On the contrary, it is conscious, and it holds a dim light of lucidity that you can tap into and enhance with mindfulness meditation. There might already be wisdom in your fantasy, if you care to look.

(04/06/2024)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness

2Footnote 4, p.471. in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness