Recent Research
Eric Klinger's research in the 1980s showed that most daydreams are about ordinary, everyday events and help to remind us of mundane tasks. Klinger's research also showed that over 75% of workers in "boring jobs", such as lifeguards and truck drivers, use vivid daydreams to "ease the boredom" of their routine tasks. Klinger found that less than 5% of the workers' daydreams involved explicitly sexual thoughts and that violent daydreams were also uncommon.
Israeli high school students who scored high on the Daydreaming Scale of the IPI had more empathy than students who scored low. Some psychologists, such as Los Angeles' Joseph E. Shorr, use the mental imagery created during their clients' daydreaming to help gain insight into their mental state and make diagnoses.
Other recent research has also shown that daydreaming, much like nighttime dreaming, is a time when the brain consolidates learning. Daydreaming may also help people to sort through problems and achieve success. Research with fMRI shows that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving become activated during daydreaming episodes.
Research by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett has found that people who experience vivid dream-like mental images reserve the word for these, whereas many other people when they talk about "daydreaming" refer to milder imagery, realistic future planning, review of past memories, or just "spacing out"
Read more about this topic: Daydream
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