Lost in a dream world? Good for you

On days when nothing much happens, people can spend up to 40 per cent of their time in the land of fantasy, psychologists say. These flights of fancy are not necessarily a waste of time as they can help us come to terms with reality and take life into our own hands.

Provided, that is, they are put to the right use, says Berlin psychologist Gabriele Zu Oettingen, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Educational Research and an expert on daydreams.

Daydreams were first looked upon as superfluous ventures into a better world and seen as signifying an inability to strike a balance between reality and wishful thinking. That was certainly how Sigmund Freud interpreted daydreams. Happy folk never fantasise, he said, only dissatisfied people. But recent research findings contradict the views espoused by the founder of psychoanalysis.

US psychologist Jerome Singer, a daydream research pioneer, found that daydreamers with their rich inner world were often better able than others to cope with reality. He found that criminal offenders and drug addicts live highly extrovert lives and are more heavily dependent on the influence of their surroundings than people who occasionally dive deep into the world of fantasy. Singer’s explanation is that even a make-believe approach to problems can help the daydreamer to come to terms with them in reality.

Many experts say that daydreams make a major contribution toward managing emotions. They can bring consolation, pacify, give pleasure and help to work off frustration, says psychologist Axel Wolf in the latest issue of the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today).

But this is all subject to a most important premise, according to Oettingen and her fellow-researchers. Wishful thinking must be confronted with reality and must not be just a pie in the sky. “You will only achieve success if you transform positive wishful thinking into firm objectives,” says Oettingen. The difference is that firm objectives take into account personal expectations and past experience, thereby establishing a link with one’s personal reality.

This is particularly evident in the context of young love. The psychologists advertised in newspapers to find volunteers who had just fallen in love but had not yet told the other person how they felt about them. It transpired that the sceptical dreamers among them were much more successful in building up a relationship than the rose-tinted dreamers who mainly preferred to worship their beloved from afar – in the mind’s eye rather than in reality.People who are carried away like this are, in the long run, incapable of action, Oettingen says. They neither get to act in any committed way so as to achieve the object of their dreams nor are they able to free themselves from it in any real way.