Why is daydreaming worth taking seriously?

After Freud had spent years making everyone think the unconscious was a dark, neurotic basement of the psyche, full of anxiety, repressed trauma and darkness (a miserable view of childhood and all that kind of stuff), the French thinker Gaston Bachelard was far more interested in the sunny side of imagination. He wanted to see the positive side of the unconscious, and of semi-conscious states.

In his book The Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard draws a line between the dreams you have at night and what he called waking reverie. Night-time dreams, he said, are an involuntary thing that happens to you when you’re asleep, where the I (not necessarily your ego, but you, the I who’s experiencing the dream) tends to disappear. You’re not really in control of what’s going on. Sleep might be fairly refreshing for your body, but it doesn’t necessarily, Bachelard said, give your soul much of a rest. He says: “the repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.” So there’s a dark side to night-time dreams.

Reverie, though, you can think of as a kind of conscious daydreaming. You’re still present, you’re relaxed, and there’s a life-restoring side to it. It’s a bit of a sanctuary in the day. This is where our productivity-obsessed culture tends to dismiss daydreaming as laziness, or just wasted time. Bachelard was like, no, this isn’t some intellectual void. He thought reverie is where your psyche genuinely gets a bit of a rest: a gentle, quite peaceful awareness.

Imagine you’re sat on a Sunday afternoon, watching the flames of a coal fire flickering away. Or it might be me on my allotment, watching a couple of butterflies dancing across the potato flowers. For a moment, the world stops looking like an obstacle course of issues and problems you’re constantly trying to solve. He says: “reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

This, Bachelard thinks, is where you really start inhabiting your surroundings. The dividing line between you as an observer and the world out there around you kind of melts away. He sees reverie as restoring a childlike, cosmic relation to existence, where you can marvel at ordinary things. Normal everyday things become really engaging and interesting, and you don’t have to be restlessly thinking: right, what can I get out of this? What can I use it for? How is this going to be productive? You don’t have to make them a project where you’re counting the minutes.

Bachelard says that “when the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.” And: “Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society.” By society he just means all the busyness: the projects, the calendar appointments, the expectations, the status games, all that kind of thing. He thinks that when you allow yourself to daydream, and immerse yourself in the normalness of what’s going on around you, that’s when you become a genuinely free being, psychologically speaking. So try to let your imagination run a bit wilder, and enjoy the ordinary things going on around you. They don’t have to be productive all the time.

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.