The Art of Daydreaming

When I was a young whippersnapper in school, back when dinosaurs were roaming the earth, I often found myself staring out the window, my mind a million miles away from whatever was happening around me.

My teachers referred to me as a daydreamer. They were concerned about my future, or lack thereof. Their notion of a superior student was one who sat in the front row, enthralled with the subject matter and garnering every word at undivided attention. Apparently, I was doomed for failure.

In fact, I was daydreaming so often that once in the fifth grade I discovered the meaning of life, but I forgot to write it down.

I spent most of my adult working life as a computer programmer and system analyst. This requires a lot of thinking. Fortunately, most managers can't tell if a computer programmer is thinking or daydreaming. It was the perfect job for a daydreamer who was doomed for failure.

According to Dr. Laurie Nadel, author of SIXTH SENSE: UNLOCKING YOUR ULTIMATE MIND POWER, our mind is automatically designed to open our intuitive sense to a higher consciousness but our perceptions and thoughts often prevent us from doing so.

Dr. Nadel writes, "Maybe you find yourself staring out the window, your mind faraway from the tasks at hand. If somebody speaks to you, you find yourself startled by the sound of his voice. Or you don't understand what was said the first time and ask the speaker to repeat himself. These are signs that your body is entering an ultradian rest response."

The "ultradian rest response" is a fancy-schmacy way of saying "daydreaming."

Dr. Nadel claims that the pattern of "a subtle mental fuzziness" is repeated about every 90 minutes. During this period, the right hemisphere of the brain becomes dominant. This is the intuitive and creative region of the neocortex.

When a person loses concentration and enters a state of ultradian rest response, the four main regulatory systems that link mind and body realign.

1) The autonomic nervous system that regulates most of your body's important functions.

2) The endocrine system that regulates production of your pituitary, thalamus, hypothalamus, and thyroid hormones, among others.

3) The immune system.

4) The system of information substance chemicals (neuropeptides) in your brain.

This is the window of time where you are most likely to have a sudden insightful moment into yourself.

Rather than forcing yourself to push through the mental fatigue of the ultradian rest response, you should allow impressions from your intuitive right hemisphere to flow through your mind. It's time for a daydream break.

And as you become more aware of the physiology of intuition, your body's natural rhythms will help you ease into an intuitive state. By recognizing the onset of a ultradian rest response, you can enhance the results by spending time in peaceful silence while your body does its neurophysiological repair work.

Ernest Rossi, author of THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF MIND–BODY HEALING, writes, "during the ultradian rest response, your body goes into an intuitive mode. You are more receptive to impressions from your unconscious. This is a time when the unconscious wants all the energy it can get. If you train yourself to just watch and observe and not intrude, you're going to fall into a more naturally intuitive state."

If you let the ultradian rest response have all the energy, it can most efficiently do all the necessary physiological healing.

Rossi writes, "Most forms of healing, including shamanism and the holistic forms of healing are rituals for helping out to get into this ultradian response because it's so easy to entrain."

Mind chatter keeps us within the five senses of perceived reality. Daydreaming is when the mind becomes silent. The silence allows you to go anywhere because within the silence is everywhere. This is the moment when insight and intuition and creativity and imagination break through.

Imagination led Ben Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the printing press, the telescope, radio, the telephone, motion pictures, automobiles, television, the Internet, cell phones, men on the moon, rock-n-roll and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.

Imagine that.

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Quote for the Day – "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein
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