Understanding Daydreaming, Article Review Example

The article by Eric Klinger “Understanding Daydreaming” is about where daydreams come from, their origin in the brain, and the impact and sophistication on the conscious and unconscious mind.

He presents how people in a dreaming state can be manipulated by conscious actions around them. He explains how repeating a man’s girlfriends name while he was sleeping in a condition he was uncomfortable, he described a dream where his girlfriend broke up with him, while he was still vaguely aware of the experiment that was going on around him. It seemed the dream centered around his anxiety of having the test conducted on him at all.

They found in another study that on average we daydream about half the time. These daydreams are broken into three different kinds: fanciful thoughts, spontaneous thoughts, or dissociative thoughts. These different kinds of daydreams seem unrelated at all.

Studies also found that humans can manipulate, and even steer their own prompted daydreams. This is very interesting when considering the connection of the conscious and unconscious mind, especially with reference to lucid dreaming.

At the end of the day, emotions truly lead the daydream of anyone. Anxieties, fears, wants, dreams, and other unconscious feelings can come to light in daydreams, and they are more likely to manifest themselves more vividly in times of happiness or of distress,

It also seems people find their own daydreams extremely private, which not only adds to the difficulty in their study, but also backs up the theory of extreme emotion while daydreaming. Emotions are the key to any daydream, and will continue to be studied as the conscious and unconscious mind.