I walk among trees that reveal the serene autumn sunset and cover the ground with leaves of bright and warm colours. The environment is inspiring and makes my attention focus on that welcoming landscape, but soon those internal images reappear that “overlap” what I perceive and that seem to have their own dynamic. They are daydreams. Brief memories of what happened during the day, or situations that caused me some tension and they repeat themselves over and over again in my head as if I were trying to resolve what happened. Images also appear of something I wanted to do tomorrow and that I have to mentally review or organize so that I don’t miss anything.
By Jordi Jimenez
In the article: Levels of consciousness, from sleep to awakening we already talked about daydreams and waking with daydreams when studying the levels of consciousness, but now we are going to go a little deeper into this phenomenon. We said that they are called daydreams because they have certain similarities with those trains of images typical of sleep, with the difference that daydreams occur when we are awake, with our eyes open and with a certain control of our attentional mechanisms, memory, etc.
Characteristics
Although the flow of images in consciousness is constant and normal in the everyday waking state, these daydreams denote a low state of attention, or rather, a mechanical state of attention. That is, our consciousness is generating all these trains of images without us asking it to. It is something that it does on its own, mechanically. Our attention and our intention is, in many cases, focused on resolving everyday issues, on acting among the objects of the external world and attending to the demands of that external world. For example, I have an appointment with some friends and I have to take a transport to go to the meeting place at a certain time. In that small plan I have to resolve certain things beforehand (not forgetting the book they asked me to bring) and then moving around the street, the cars, the transport, the money to pay for it, the schedules, whether it is raining or sunny… in short, a multitude of small details. But if it is something that I have done before, I can resolve the issue with a minimum of attention to it, with a minimum of energy. So, since I have free energy, my consciousness “entertains” itself by launching its images, its daydreams, with topics that are not relevant. So I move around the city and while I am dreaming about a lot of things that appear associated with stimuli or memories.
The mechanism is very curious. Any stimulus I receive, be it visual, auditory or of any other kind, can unleash trains of images by association, contiguity or contrast. I go down the street, I come across a person who looks like someone I know and images or memories of that acquaintance begin to appear by association with that stimulus. And just like in dreams, some images are linked to others forming a kind of connecting thread, a kind of endless narrative. You could say that we are telling each other stories all day long.
But it is clear that if consciousness expends energy in this wandering of daydreams it is because it fulfils some function. We will see this later.
Functions and types
Every image creation in consciousness is a “response” of the latter to stimuli that may be internal or external. Therefore, daydreams, as an image phenomenon, also fulfil certain functions. The main one is to compensate for deficiencies or to resolve difficulties imaginatively. “Compensation” is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the human psyche that seeks to reestablish balance in the psychophysical circuit as imbalances occur.
In our daily life, situations constantly occur that cause small, normal tensions that are also necessary because they allow the dynamics of consciousness and life. On the other hand, daily experiences occur in a disorderly manner for consciousness, they occur as they come. Daydreams try to put a little order in events and thus compensate for the tensions that have been generated. It is a constant feedback loop of tensions and relaxations that seeks to maintain balance, as we have said. What other mechanism exists to compensate for excess tension? We mentioned it in the previous article: catharsis.
There are two types of daydreams: primary and secondary. Secondary daydreams are those related to situations. That is, there are a series of stimuli (as in the previous example) and the consciousness sends out images associated with those stimuli. When the stimuli change, the associated daydreams also change. You forget about that and now you dream about that other thing. You can spend a few days thinking about a topic (daydreaming) because it is something that has more emotional charge for you and it is a little harder to relax that topic, but in the end, you forget about it and you move on to other topics depending on the new stimuli. That is why these secondary daydreams are also called situational.
Primary daydreams, however, are those in which the same theme is repeated over and over again, no matter how much time passes. The same story, the same emotional charge. These primary daydreams that are repeated are very important because their study cannot reveal something that we do not normally notice. They can reveal a knot that the conscience is trying to resolve, to integrate, but cannot. They show what produces a permanent (non-situational) tension that is always present, no matter how much time passes and my circumstances or contexts change.
This is where we can turn to the study of dreams as described in the Self-Liberation manual, in the section on Self-Knowledge. This study should be done in a group and with someone who already has some experience in this work and a certain knowledge of the psychology of the image that we have been describing in these articles.
“The best way to track primary daydreams is to pay attention to these images, these wanderings that form when one is about to fall asleep or when awakening, that is, at the “semi-sleep” level of consciousness. But these images also appear and are easy to track at the “wake” level (awake), when one experiences fatigue. Tracking primary daydreams at the dream level of consciousness is more difficult because there the images that arise as “dreams” are sometimes the primary daydreams themselves and sometimes they are secondary daydreams of a situation (compensations for thirst, hunger, heat, bad body positions, etc.).” [Self-Liberation, Self-Knowledge Practices, Lesson 6].
If you have been able to do this image tracking, you will be able to check the similarities between them. The repeated images will be the permanent primary daydreams. The primary daydreams that you have managed to determine must be studied in relation to the current situation that you are living. In this sense, you will have to ask yourself what these daydreams discovered in the tracking are compensating for.
From these works, it will be possible to determine something very important that is behind primary daydreams: the dream core. This dream core is a basic mental climate (that is, it is an emotional core and, therefore, not rational), which is what gives rise to compensatory primary daydreams in the form of images that discharge (compensate) the greatest permanent internal tensions. But, at the same time, these images guide our behaviour towards the world. Therefore, the dream core is the main generator of behaviour that we have, it determines our basic activities for a long time. It could be said that our behaviour is nothing more than a structural compensation of tensions and climates that seeks to recompose psychic equilibrium every day.
But these studies and works are already of a certain complexity and we will have to do them, as we said, accompanied by other people with whom we can exchange and dialogue in order to reach understandings of a certain depth. Here is a link to the complete text of Self-Liberation so that you can advance along this path if it is of interest to you.
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