Visionaries of every sort credit daydreams for creating conditions ripe for moments of insight to blossom.

Einstein, at the age of sixteen, pictured himself in a daydream traveling alongside a light beam, a bit of fanciful imagery that he later credited as the seed of his theory of relativity.

Mozart daydreamed about music on long walks through the countryside—imagined sounds that became the basis of famed compositions.

Walt Disney came up with the idea for a theme park while idly watching his daughters ride by on a merry-go-round.

Aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready watched a red-tailed hawk in flight and flashed on a concept that he used to build the first successful man-powered plane, the Gossamer Condor.

Though some have intuitively sensed the connection between daydreaming and creativity, recent scientific studies are combining with an abundance of anecdotal evidence to establish that when daydreaming, we are literally in our most creative state of mind, tapping into and connecting the most complex regions of the brain.

The beauty of daydreaming is that it’s a process available to every one of us. Yet many of us know relatively little about it. In our production-oriented, to-do-list world, we practically worship the focused, directed mind. We laud the pursuit of the quiet mind after wearing it out with the stress of incessant activity and striving. Yet we disparage our third state of mind, our most creative, imaginative, problem-solving, energizing, and entertaining mental state—the daydreaming mind.

The Engine of Your Imagination

Researchers say that everyone with an intact brain daydreams, and that the human mind spends a whopping 30 to 70 percent of its waking time in various states of mind wandering.

When you think about it, this significant amount of time we spend “lost in thought” isn’t that surprising. After all, we humans are a creative species. We get bored easily; our minds wander, and wander in imaginative ways that have moved us in a relatively short span of time from cave dwellers to websurfing, space-age globetrotters. It’s the ability to imagine that propels us. As such, daydreaming is both the engine that drives our imagination, and the nursery where ideas germinate.

            Part of the problem in discussing daydreams, however, has been defining the term. Even psychologists and neurologists don’t have an exact definition but have loosely described the experience as spontaneous thoughts that occur when our awareness is separated from the task at hand or from our immediate physical environment. In those moments, we turn to an inner world. We can still drive or walk or wash dishes or scroll down the screen, but it’s as if we’re on automatic pilot or in a semi-trance. We’re not seeing the details of the real world anymore; we’re in an inward space, as if watching our own private movie.

            These mind wanderings differ from directed, deliberate thought in that they are unintended. It’s thought that just pops into our head. We’re engaged in directed thought when we’re doing something very specific, say, working out a math problem—and our mind is rooted in the here and now as we focus on the details and the outcome.

            Because daydreams are uncensored and free associating, they help us discover solutions that the focused mind, locked in its tunnel vision, can’t access. We’ve all had the experience in which we’ve been struggling to solve a problem. We’ve brainstormed and analyzed, and yet the answer never arrives. Then, as we’re doing something “mindless” like walking to the elevator or drifting off to sleep, the brain relaxes and moves into its daydreaming state, and the “aha” moment arrives unbidden.

In fact, when people use the phrase, “I need to sleep on it,” they probably mean they need to tuck it into the back of their mind and let it percolate and see what bubbles up—and when the answer does bubble up, it will be in a daydreaming state.

Yet the answer doesn’t magically come out of nowhere—the answer comes from the mind’s store of knowledge and experience—the daydreaming mind simply links it all together in ways the focused mind couldn’t envision.

There’s a video making the rounds on the Internet that shows the limitations of focus. In the experiment set up by two Harvard scientists, six students pass around a basketball. Half of them wear white shirts, the other half black. The viewers’ assignment: count the number of times the players in white shirts pass the ball to one another. At the end of the one-minute video, viewers give their score. What approximately half the viewers in this study missed as they were dutifully counting the number of passes was that a person dressed in a gorilla suit strode into the middle of the game, did a little shimmy, and moved on, all in flagrant view of the camera.

A friend sent me the video with instructions to count accurately, and I followed those directions exactly, eager to prove my worth as a basketball-passing counter. The result—I missed the gorilla completely. When I replayed it, sure enough, there it was. Right smack in the middle. But because I was so absorbed in completing my assigned task, I missed the obvious and ultimately far more relevant point.

Of course, we can miss the obvious when daydreaming as well. The point is we have different types of thought for a reason. One type isn’t inherently better than the other; but for some reason, we worship at the altar of focus while making daydreaming the crazy uncle in the attic.

It makes sense to learn to work our various levels of perception to the maximum advantage: to help us see the details when necessary, to take a step back and observe the larger scene so we don’t miss the gorillas among us, and to step back even farther in our daydreams and conceptualize those gorillas yet to be seen.

Unfortunately, too many of us have been ingrained to think that daydreaming is a time-squandering, silly, even embarrassing activity––rather than the incredibly useful human talent that it is. What other species has the capacity to imagine, to dive in and out of the past and future, to simulate events, even to envision things that are out of the realm of what seems possible?

This ability to “see” images in our daydreams—to visualize, model, and replicate the known and unknown—is an unrivaled human capacity in terms of its application to creativity. To get the idea of what visual imagery is, try this simple exercise pointed out to me by daydream and mental imagery expert Eric Klinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who in turn got the example from psychologist Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927)—stop and mentally count the windows in your house.

Notice what you’ve done—you’ve either visualized each room in your mind’s eye as you sought to count the windows or you’ve visualized the house from the outside. You are visually seeing and counting something without literally seeing the object.

Though we all have the capacity to visualize, people vary tremendously in how vivid that imagery is, says Klinger. Einstein, for instance, relied heavily on his ability to visualize during his daydreaming states, which he referred to as “thought experiments,” even claiming that he valued his visualizations over actual laboratory experiments.

“Over the years,” writes Walter Isaacson in Einstein: His Life and Universe, “he would picture in his mind such things as lightning strikes and moving trains, accelerating elevators and falling painters, two-dimensional blind beetles crawling on curved branches, as well as a variety of contraptions designed to pinpoint, at least in theory, the locations and velocity of speeding electrons.”

Though mainly visual, daydreams can also involve the other senses—sound, touch, taste, and smell. Musicians, for example, tend to have daydreams in which they hear music, which for composers serves as the starting point of a composition—ala Mozart in the opening example.

When Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Harvey Hubbell V (Loop Dreams and Dislecksia: The Movie) describes how he makes “movies in his head” in an article in the New York Times, he says, “‘I would close my eyes and see pictures. I’d hear music, too—like from a marching band or something—and I knew right where it should come in.’” Though Hubbell was one of those school kids who was always getting yelled at for daydreaming, he credits this gift as the basis for his success as a filmmaker.

While the ability to experience imagery in daydreaming is critical to creativity, it’s not the only reason daydreaming is such an innovation-inspiring state of mind. The uncensored aspect of daydreaming is also priceless in that it gives us both the means and the freedom to explore, without an internal critic hovering over us, second-guessing or disparaging every thought. What happens in your daydreams, stays in your daydreams, unless you choose to share. You own them, nobody sees them, no one is grading them, and in that way you are free to try out any number of concepts that might not be ready for prime time.

The ability to free associate while daydreaming is yet another critical link to inspiration. I know we’ve all had the experience of not being able to find the right word, it’s on the tip of the tongue, but we just can’t get it. Then for seemingly no reason, it pops into our mind and we shout it out, often in front of bewildered colleagues or strangers.

Any number of external prompts can trigger associations and related mind wanderings. Say, you’re driving along and you see something that reminds you of something else, and your mind takes off down the proverbial rabbit hole. At a red light, while staring off into space, I catch a glimpse of an ice cream stand from the corner of my eye and say aloud to my husband, “We need to get your Mom a birthday present.”

Sometimes a place or thing will launch a distinct memory, a flashback complete with visual images, maybe even sounds, or a sense of touch. When I see the Rolling Stones’ logo of that impudent tongue sticking out of lush red lips, I am instantly back in a high school classroom doodling that logo over and over on lined notebook paper, the opening twangy notes of “Honky Tonk Woman” somewhere in the background. That logo is emblematic of a time in my life, and so I flash to an image that resonates on a personal level, perhaps in this case, my own teenage longings.

“We humans are a reactive species,” writes psychologist Eric Klinger, “and daydreams are a reaction to everything around us in our external and internal worlds.”

            Contrary to popular stereotypes, most daydreams are not wild fantasies but simply moments when the mind leaves the task at hand to explore goals and concerns, desires and fears. As such, daydreams and their more colorful relative—fantasies—aren’t always good and pleasant, as some people may think. For some, the words “daydream” and “fantasy” have an inherently pleasure-associated connotation, but that’s a limited and incorrect view.

While many daydreams and fantasies do carry positive emotional correlations, not all are sweetness and light. Sometimes we construct negative, even fearful, scenarios in daydreams and fantasies, and other times our mind wanderings are neutral thoughts that serve as pop-up goal reminders.

If you think you don’t daydream because you associate daydreams only with wishful thinking, ask yourself this: Do you ever mentally rehearse and envision a conversation or an event, for example an interview or a discussion with a colleague or significant other? Do you revisit an argument in your mind in which you wished you had said something different, the memory so powerful that you get the corresponding emotions—anger or embarrassment or the thrill of victory? When you spontaneously slip into one of these imagined conversations, your mind has glided into a daydream.

Your Built-in Goal Reminder

Much of what we have to do throughout the day is mundane—tasks that don’t require our undivided attention, but tasks that need to get done nonetheless, like driving to work or filling out expense reports. These are short-term goals—get to work, fill out the form—but they don’t represent all of our goals, either other short-term goals that need our attention or our long-term life goals, such as creating a business, writing a book, building a dream home, falling in love, taking care of your family, achieving fame and fortune . . . Whatever your heart longs for, your daydreams are there in part to remind you of plans outside of your immediate reality. Daydreaming, in essence, allows your mind to multi-task.

“The capacity to think of things that are not necessarily in your external world is huge in a practical sense,” daydream researcher Malia Mason told me during an interview. She gives the example of being stuck in a car in traffic. On the one hand, you’re inching along, operating your vehicle; on the other hand, you are able to reflect on a past event, imagine what would happen if you did something differently, or picture what you’re going to do when you get out of the car. She calls this “an extremely efficient type of architecture” in which we are simultaneously “able to have conscious awareness of what’s going on around us, and also to say, ‘I’m not stuck in the here and now. I’m not this creature that’s just bound to the external world.’”

Mason says an interesting way to look at the incredible power and function of daydreaming is to ask: what would happen if we couldn’t switch back and forth between directed thought and daydreaming? We would be “stimulus-bound creatures,” Mason says. “I couldn’t be having this conversation with you and simultaneously be aware that I was at home a couple of hours ago brushing my teeth and later I’m going to be at dinner with my friends. It introduces continuity that wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

Daydreaming gives us a capacity for interruption that allows us to switch back and forth between interests, without seriously affecting the task at hand. “It’s fascinating that we can pull this off,” says Mason. “We can manage the external world and daydream at the same time. To do that you have to know what you can get away with. Some part of the brain has to know.”

As an example of the multi-tasking capability of the daydreaming mind—when I’m drying my hair after my shower, I inevitably go off into a daydream state. I often think about a book I’m working on—mine or someone else’s—I often imagine that I’m presenting the idea at an editorial meeting. I visualize other people, though it’s more of a hazy vision, I don’t have to fill in all the details, it’s just there running in the background. I’m trying to explain the book or a concept. In the process, I’m constantly trying out new ways of articulating it, imagining responses, and then adapting accordingly. I know I’m in this daydreaming state because everything else I’m doing is on autopilot. I’m literally not focusing externally—I’m focusing inward, my mind’s eye is on the internal scene. To snap out of it, partly as an experiment for this book, I look in the mirror and literally adjust my focus again on the tangible—the paint chipping on an edge of the mirror frame, the droplets running down the shower door . . .

But the physicality of the bathroom is boring, so I go back to daydreaming about a book.

This ability to switch back and forth between tasks in the external world while being able to “concentrate” on something else in our daydreaming mind––something more problematic or interesting or challenging––is arguably what has propelled us as a species to make such rapid advances in a relatively short span of time.

Though it’s yet to be conclusively established, daydreaming most likely has an evolutionary biological function. “It stands to reason that anything that people do this much must serve some important functions,” writes Eric Klinger. “After all, one of the cardinal rules of biology is that species gradually lose those capabilities and tendencies that cease to pay off. . . . If daydreaming were useless, we would surely do a great deal less of it than seems to be the case.”