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F. Callard et al. (eds.), The Restless Compendium,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_4
Abstract This chapter was conceived during an interdisciplinary psy-
chological experiment, in which geographer Hazel Morrison asked par-
ticipants to record and describe in face-to-face interviews their everyday
experiences of mind wandering. Questions abound concerning the legiti-
macy of interviewee narratives when describing subjective experience, and
the limits of language in achieving ‘authentic’ description. These con-
cerns increase when looking at mind-wandering experiences, because of
the absence of meta-cognition during periods of self-generated thought.
Here, Hazel explores the tensions at play in twentieth-century discourses
around the self, fantasy and expression.
Keywords Anna Freud · Mind wandering · Psychoanalysis · Self-
representation · Sigmund Freud · Virginia Woolf
The experience of mind wandering – which tends, now, to be placed by the
discipline of psychology under the umbrella term ‘self-generated thought’,
along with associated states such as daydream, fantasy and reverie – is rec-
ognized as a ubiquitous component of everyday life.1 ‘[I]n day-dreaming’,
CHAPTER 4
Writing and Daydreaming
Hazel Morrison
H. Morrison (*)
Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
e-mail: hazel.morrison@durham.ac.uk
28 H. MORRISON
wrote Jerome Singer, ‘all of us are in a sense authorities because of the
very private nature of our experiences’.2 Yet when looking to the history
of psychological research that underpins contemporary understandings of
mind wandering, ‘all of us’, that is, the generic you and I who experi-
ence our minds wandering every day, are notably absent. This isn’t to say
that the voices, experiences and narratives of everyday people are entirely
obscured. Rather the reliability – or, one might say, the authority – of the
subjective viewpoint is repeatedly denigrated.3
This, argue Schooler and Schreiber, is because although our experi-
ence of mind wandering is in itself undeniable, our ability to accurately
represent our experience is frequently inadequate.4 A momentary loss of
‘meta-cognition’, or self-reexive awareness of our mental state, is com-
monly recognized to characterize the transition to the mind wandering
state.5 And if we are unable to recognize our minds having wandered,
the validity of our accounts of these fugitive mental processes must be
questionable. There are historical precedents to this problematic. The psy-
chologist William James, for example, famously compared the attempt to
capture such eeting subjectivity as that of grasping ‘a spinning top to
catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how
the darkness looks’.6
I agree that the aforementioned denigration of the authority of subjec-
tive experience may be traced to this long-standing issue of meta-cognition,
and its absence during periods of mind wandering. However, James rec-
ognized a second impediment to introspection, which, until recently, has
received little attention within mainstream psychology. This he identied
as the limitation of language, claiming an ‘absence of a special vocabulary
for subjective facts’, which hindered the study of all ‘but the very coarsest
of them’.7 More than a century on, Callard, Smallwood and Margulies, in
a commentary on scientic investigations of the mind at ‘rest’, recognize
a similar problematic. A ‘historical bias’, they write, ‘toward explicating
external processing has meant the psychological vocabulary for describing
internally generated mental content is relatively stunted.’8 Nonetheless,
they suggest there exist pockets of literature, now ‘largely unknown or
disregarded in cognitive psychology’ which once used heterogeneous
methods to study and elicit states of ‘daydream, fantasy, mind wandering
and dissociation’.9
To bring some of these methods to greater visibility, this chapter looks
back to the period 1908–23, a period during which daydream and fantasy
were experimentally explored through diverse introspective practices,
4 WRITING AND DAYDREAMING 29
ranging from the free association methods of psychoanalysis to stream
of consciousness literary techniques. Reading Sigmund Freud’s famous
essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in relation both to
his daughter Anna Freud’s essay ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a
Day-Dream’ (1923) and to Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the
Wall’ (1919), this chapter explores the place of writing within complexes
of daydream and fantasy. These interconnected texts make clear the com-
plexities of articulating inner, mental phenomena through the medium of
the written word. In so doing, they offer additional paths through which
we might understand why the subjective viewpoint has often been deni-
grated or downplayed within the history of daydreaming and mind wan-
dering research.i
Multiplicity of the Self and
the fragility of Self-repreSentation
Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) is
known for its long-standing contribution to studies of daydream and
fantasy, phenomena now frequently brought into conuence with mind
wandering.10 Freud recognized imaginative activities such as daydreaming,
‘phantasy’ and building ‘castles in the air’ as normal human behaviour. Yet
despite the ubiquitous nature of daydreaming, he understood it to neces-
sitate concealment.11
Why? Freud identied socially unacceptable egoistic and erotic wishes
as signicant motive forces that furnish the contents of fantasy and day-
dream. Freud wrote of the ‘well-brought-up young woman’ being
‘allowed a minimum of erotic desire’, and of the young man who must
learn to subdue an ‘excess of self-regard’ to gain acceptance in society. At
the extreme, to allow one’s daydreams to become ‘over-luxuriant’ and
overpowerful was seen to risk the onset of ‘neurosis or psychosis’.12
Only the creative writer, argued Freud, was uniquely able to articu-
late ‘his [sic] personal daydreams without self-reproach or shame’. The
aesthetic qualities of prose were seen by Freud to ‘soften’, ‘disguise’ and
sublimate the egotistical elements of the daydream, allowing author and
reader alike covert indulgence in the pleasure of fantasizing.13 ii
i See Chap. 5.
ii Cf. Chap. 7.
30 H. MORRISON
creativity, Self and SubliMation:
‘the Mark on the Wall’
Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919) exemplies
the skill of the creative writer in giving expression to daydream, reverie
and fantasy. Like Freud, Woolf recognizes the commonality of the expe-
rience of daydreaming: even the most ‘modest mouse-coloured people’,
claims the narrator, cherish moments of self-referential imaginative indul-
gence, despite believing ‘genuinely that they dislike to hear their own
praises.’14 Moreover, Woolf’s text addresses how, for daydream and
fantasy to be freely expressed, the writer must deploy tactics of disguise
and deection.
Woolf’s experimental approach to depicting inner monologue mimics
the rhythms and effects of the wandering mind, as her writing gravitates
from domestic space towards thoughts of childhood fancy. The sight
of burning coals evokes description of a ‘calvacade of red knights … an
old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps’. Distracted, her
thoughts ‘swarm upon a new object’: a poorly perceived mark, ‘black upon
the white wall …’. Rich and humorous, her prose its from some current
impression (a bowl, ower, cigarette smoke) to self-referential thoughts
and fantasies. Intermittently her train of thought returns to the mark on
the wall: lifting this new object up ‘as ants carry a blade of straw so fever-
ishly’, before leaving it to be picked up later, afresh.15
While Woolf’s text meanders, and on occasion tumbles, from one
thought to the next, a succession of passages offers the opportunity to r eect
on the thought processes that permit fantasized, egotistical self-expression.
‘I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought’, states the narrator, ‘a
track indirectly reecting credit upon myself’. These, she continues, ‘are
not thoughts directly praising oneself’. Rather, they express indirectly a
gure of self, ‘lovingly, stealthily … not openly adoring’. This, declares
Woolf’s narrator, ‘is the beauty of them’.16
Woolf portrays daydreaming as a mode of thought that allows for the
creation of a sense of self invested with depth, colour and romance. Yet
the author also recognizes an inherent danger in giving voice to daydream
and fantasy. Woolf’s text hints at deep motivations for concealment and
sublimation, for like Freud, she writes of the urge to protect the idealized
self-image from the gaze of the external world. If this idealized self-image
were to be openly recognized, its integrity would become threatened. To
have one’s fantasized sense-of-self disappear is, for the narrator, to become
4 WRITING AND DAYDREAMING 31
‘only a shell of a person’, as seen by others. Indeed, writes Woolf, ‘what an
airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!’17
For the protagonist of the story, the destruction of an inner self-image
that exists within the realm of fantasy is a genuine threat. Fear lies with
the potential for ‘idolatry’, for a sense of self being ‘made ridiculous, or
too unlike the original to be believed in any longer’. In this sense, Woolf’s
short story suggests why daydream, fantasy and mind wandering are states
of mind that resist introspective redescription: to give self-expression to
the wandering mind is to risk damaging the inner self. Writing, I suggest,
emerges as a crucial intermediary for Woolf, through which the fantasized
self may be given self-expression.18
fragMentation
[I]n the daydream each new addition or repetition of a separate scene
afford[s] anew opportunity for pleasurable instinctual gratication. In the
written story … the direct pleasure gain is abandoned.19
Anna Freud – as the quotation above from her essay ‘The Relation of
Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream’ (1923) indicates – offers another
model for the complex relationship between daydreaming, subjectiv-
ity and writing. In this essay, she presents the case of a young female
patient, characterized by a strong propensity to daydream. The girl,
Anna Freud writes, had a history of fantasy thinking in which two
polarized thought patterns dominated. By encouraging the girl, during
analysis, to express the contents of these daydreams, Anna Freud
explores how processes of repression and transformation link the inner
daydream to its articulation in the ‘real’ world.20 In doing so, she pos-
tulates more precisely than Sigmund Freud how daydreaming experi-
ence is transformed and transgured once communicated through the
written word.
In Anna Freud’s essay, the girl’s early fantasies of beating are shown to
have culminated in masturbatory climax. As the girl aged, these fantasies
were increasingly repressed as the girl associated them with shame and
displeasure. The girl was then reported to have developed seemingly con-
verse daydreams, which she labelled ‘nice stories’. These are understood
by Anna Freud as the transformation of the beating fantasy into stories
acceptable to the girl’s sense of morality, which yet enable a similar degree
of pleasurable gratication.
32 H. MORRISON
In both the beating fantasies and ‘nice’ daydreams, Freud relates that
the girl ‘did not feel bound to work out a logical sequence of events’ of
the kind that would characterize a written narrative. Rather she scanned
forward and back to differing phases of the tale; she might ‘interpose a new
situation between two already completed and contemporaneous scenes’,
to the extent that the ‘frame of her stories was in danger of being shat-
tered’.21 Each repetition and addition to the daydream was understood
to enable renewed opportunity for ‘pleasurable instinctual gratication’.
Yet when the daydream became ‘especially obtrusive’, the girl turned to
writing, reportedly ‘as a defence against excessive preoccupation with it’.22
Anna Freud noted a sharp difference between the unbridled, multi-layered
sequence of events that made up the daydream, and the structured, nov-
elistic quality of daydreams transformed into a written story.iii No longer a
series of overlaid, repetitive episodes, culminating time and again in pleas-
urable climax, once written down the ‘nished story’ reportedly did ‘not
elicit any such excitement’ as during the experiencing of the daydream.
Yet this, concluded Anna Freud, put her patient ‘on the road that leads
from her fantasy life back to reality’.23 Like Sigmund Freud, who wrote
that even if an individual were to communicate his or her phantasies they
would leave the listener cold, Anna Freud recognized the role of language
in transforming the affects that accompany the daydream. Outside the psy-
choanalytic encounter, fantasy thoughts are placed within a more linear,
textual framework that attens the dynamic nature of such thinking.iv
Taking these three texts together, we might relate the suspicion of
everyday introspective accounts of mind wandering at least in part to
the complex relations tying daydream and fantasy to the written word.
Language, embedded within distinct social contexts, is in many ways
considered duplicitous in relation to the contents of consciousness. Even
if literary techniques, such as Woolf’s, attempt to evoke the rhythms and
affects characteristic of the wandering mind, writing itself is the site of
an opacity that accompanies the unfurling of inner life into the social
world. As James noted more than a century ago, the ‘lack of a word’
imposes limitations on language’s ability to represent inner experience,
complicating any straightforward relationship between experience and
expression.24
iii Cf. Chap. 10.
iv Cf. Chap. 6.
4 WRITING AND DAYDREAMING 33
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation.
noteS
1. Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, ‘The Restless Mind’,
Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): 947.
2. Jerome L. Singer, The Inner World of Daydreaming (New York: Harper,
1966), 6.
3. See also Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff, ‘Introspection and
Cognitive Brain Mapping: From Stimulus-Response to Script-Report’,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 8 (2002): 333–39; Felicity Callard,
Jonathan Smallwood, and Daniel S. Margulies, ‘Default Positions: How
Neuroscience’s Historical Legacy Has Hampered Investigation of the
Resting Mind’, Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 321.
4. Jonathan Schooler and Charles A. Schreiber, ‘Experience, Meta-Consciousness,
and the Paradox of Introspection’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 7–8
(2004): 17–18.
5. Jerome L. Singer, ‘Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations:
Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud’,
Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 5, no. 4 (2003), 464.
6. William James, The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 244.
7. Ibid., 195.
8. Callard, Smallwood, and Margulies, ‘Default Positions’, 3.
9. Ibid.
10. Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press: The Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 9: 144–45.
11. Ibid., 144–5.
12. Ibid., 146–7.
13. Ibid., 152.
14. Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall (Richmond, Surrey: Hogarth Press,
1919), 4.
15. Ibid., 1.
16. Ibid., 5.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Anna Freud, ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream Freud’
(1923), in Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and
Teachers, 1922–1935 (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1974), 154–5.
20. Ibid., 157.
34 H. MORRISON
21. Ibid., 146.
22. Ibid., 154–5.
23. Ibid., 157.
24. James, The Principles of Psychology. 195–6.
further reading
Callard, Felicity, Jonathan Smallwood, Johannes Golchert, and Daniel S.
Margulies. ‘The Era of the Wandering Mind? Twenty-First Century Research
on Self-Generated Mental Activity’. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science
4 (2013): 891.
Corballis, Michael C. The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not
Looking. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Schooler, Jonathan W., Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff, Todd C. Handy,
Erik D. Reichle and Michael A. Sayette. ‘Meta-Awareness, Perceptual
Decoupling and the Wandering Mind’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15. no. 7
(2011): 319–26.
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
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