Daydream Believer(s)?

Image via WikipediaRoger Thomson, PhD, and I have been carrying on a conversation about the very large and complex topic that could be called: Meditation: What is it? For teaching purposes, I have been a fan of the model that emphasizes meditation as a mental activity, and as a form of attentional training. Dr. Thomson has pointed out some of the limitations of that model, and I agree with him. Here are a couple of our previous posts; here and here.

[NOTE: One of the things I least like about the Blogger platform is that there is no easy way to make the comments visible just beneath the posts to which they are serving as comments... this really makes the whole "comment" procedure much less attractive and useful... So, sometimes, I just cut and paste the comment into an actual post, because otherwise it just gets lost.]

Anyhow, this discussion is worth a lot more attention, I think, and most recently (in a comment), Dr. Thomson said this:

"I agree that the shifting of attention is a useful way to talk about mindfulness and meditation, but the whole process is kind of complicated, perhaps too complicated for any single metaphor. One thing I've been noticing is the difficulty of talking about and clarifying the processes involved in our awareness of inner states. When our attention shifts from the breath to some inner daydream, it's not exactly the same as shifting our external attention from the computer screen to the keyboard. Our daydream is not just sitting there waiting for us to be aware of it, but something we do. So we don't just shift our attention to the daydream, but we engage in the behavior of daydreaming with a certain amount of awareness. Similarly, when we notice we are absorbed in a daydream, we don't just shift our attention away from it (as if it continued somewhere outside of our attention), we actually stop daydreaming. I wish I knew more about cognitive psychology to have better terms to describe "inner" awareness and "inner" behavior. Know any good references?"

My knee-jerk response was to say something along the lines of: inner, outer, experience, behavior, all the same. And that may well be true, at an ultimate level, but it isn't very helpful, at the relative level in which we try to articulate ideas, and teach, and do science...

I have been thinking about Dr. Thomson's reference to daydreaming as a mental activity... And that led me back to a focus on the therapeutic aspects of meditation training: In a clinical sense, the mental activities which appear to be most problematic for people come in two somewhat distinct categories. First, we have thinking about the past, stewing in regret, rumination, self-laceration, etc.; and this kind of process, unchecked, apparently is very much involved in depression. Second, we have worry, excessive involvement in imagining, fantasizing about, and trying to prevent future disasters; these processes seem to be a large part of anxiety disorders. Psychotherapy (and training in mindfulness) can help people to disengage from these processes, and thereby alleviate symptoms and conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders.

However: There are many other mental activities that are NOT problematic: solving a problem; enjoying pleasant memories; planning future activities. And there is the mental state (or activity) known as "flow," during which the individual becomes deeply involved in, and seems to lose awareness of, what s/he is doing (the "what" being behavior, sometimes mental, sometimes more outer or physical). Good examples would include engaging in sports, playing chess, having sex (and possibly reading a novel or watching a movie). It may well be that it would in fact be counterproductive to interrupt "flow" during these activities, to make ourselves fully aware of what we are doing, while we are doing it. Certainly one would not want to engage in mental noting or labeling, while serving a tennis ball or making love.

And, getting back to daydreaming: I would suggest that when we are engaged in daydreaming (or fantasizing), it is usually without much awareness, if any, as to the fact that we are daydreaming. And that, when we "wake up" to awareness of the nature of our mental activity, we also become aware of the freedom that we have to choose whether to continue the daydream, or, instead, to re-deploy attention elsewhere. And this choice would fall into the category of "skillful means," because of course there are times when daydreaming is perfectly fine, and other times when it would be much better to be doing something else. Sometimes, "daydreaming" is the same as rumination or worry. And I think that the "skillful means" concept probably provides us with a good model for addressing the other big topic we talked about in Chicago: distraction... can anything good come of it, or not...? More on that one, later...

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