Daydream Believers

Barrett describes daydreaming as "putting yourself in a position to let an accident happen." At the same time, however, productive daydreaming is often purposefully planned.

The idea is to relax and enter a semi-trance state with means ranging from leaning back in a soft chair in a room with dim lights and soft music to driving a car. A problem or question is posed, and the subject lets his or her mind wander. The resulting images are recorded or written down for evaluation and implementation. In Inquire Within: 24 Visualizations for Creativity & Growth (Whole Person Associates), author Andrew Schwartz, president of A.E. Schwartz & Associates, a management training and professional development provider in Boston, describes numerous techniques, including progressive relaxation and breathing exercises, to get in the right frame of mind for productive daydreaming.

Schwartz provides written guidelines to be read aloud, recorded and played back while you daydream. A typical exercise instructs the daydreamer to imagine he or she is in various settings such as a tropical paradise or preparing to dive into a pool of water. Narration guides the daydreamer through imagined activities or experiences that often serve as metaphors for real-life situations. The Decision Dive exercise, for instance, relates the experience of making a difficult decision to dive off a tall cliff.

The idea is to provide the daydreamer with an experience that will help his or her real-world performance, Schwartz says. "The most obvious area to work with is sales," he says. "Let's say somebody is afraid of cold-calling; they've been rejected 20 times, and they're emotionally paralyzed." Daydreaming can help a reluctant salesperson relax, experience a call with less stress and become open to learning new skills, Schwartz says.

Exercises may also be done in groups, often with the help of a trained facilitator. Joey Wolff, a partner in Solomon/Wolff Associates, a Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, market research firm, first gathered corporate executives together to daydream ideas for marketing telecommunications to small businesses in 1987. In a dimmed room, dreamers were taken through a creative visualization process and encouraged to imagine running a small business. Afterward, they wrote down their dreams and compared notes. One such session can generate hundreds of potentially useful ideas, says Wolff, who still uses the technique today.

You can also daydream successfully while exercising, walking or bathing. In fact, it's a good idea to occupy at least part of your mind with something else while letting your daydreams spin, Barth says.

Barrett teaches a technique for daydreaming that prompts you to listen to someone else talk, and take notes on what you hear and what you imagine. "Quite frequently, people come up with connections between seemingly irrelevant things they're thinking and what the speaker is saying," he says. "It's very powerful."

This article was originally published in the May 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Daydream Believers.