Physiologically speaking, you’re neither asleep nor awake during a daydream but, rather, in a peculiar in-between state where your thoughts are lucid but you’re still at serious risk of drooling.

Psychoanalysts often refer to this state as La-La Land when their vocabularies aren’t great.

Freud, in fact, found daydreams to be fascinating glimpses into the brain’s ability to depart from the drudgery of writing an Oedipus essay for a quick little horseback ride with a braless Greta Garbo.

Daydreaming serves an incredibly important purpose for those who are incarcerated in prisons or who work at T.G.I. Friday’s. It allows them to escape, so to speak, and imagine a life with better uniforms.

While they may often appear out of the blue, there can also be underlying triggers for daydreams, like when your daughter is giving you a fifteen-minute description of one goddam drawing.

Regardless of when they strike, don’t resist them. The daydream-fighting face is even weirder than the yawn-fighting face.

The subject matter of daydreams has been determined by modern science to vary widely, ranging from having sex with a stranger on a train to having sex with a coworker to having sex with Mila Kunis. You can even daydream during sex itself, perhaps that the situation you’re in is more romantic, or that your husband isn’t shaped like Grimace. Daydreaming in bed can, in fact, be healthy for a relationship. Some couples have evolved to the point where the characters in the different scenarios they’re daydreaming about climax at the same time.

The beauty of daydreams is that they’re private, personal little moments between you and your cubemate who just watched you kiss your own shoulder. Typically, they only last for a minute or so, but in certain circumstances strippers can keep them going through entire lap dances with really old dudes.

It’s very common to experience a brief moment of embarrassment after a daydream when you’re snapped back into reality to a confused audience and a sea lion who’s wondering how much longer you’re going to hold onto that sardine.

Daydreams differ from nighttime dreams in their lack of symbolism and the fact that you’re not wearing your night guard. Where the presence of Ryan Gosling in a nighttime dream might have latent meaning, in a daydream he’s simply there so that you can straight up eat the jeans off his legs.

It’s possible to have a daydream during a nighttime dream or even for very boring people to daydream that they’re asleep. Under rare circumstances, a daydream can even turn into a nighttime dream when you work at a mattress store.

Certain studies indicate that the average person spends eight hours a day daydreaming, while the rest of their waking hours are spent fashioning crude fishing harpoons, palm-frond hammocks, and coconut bras. Specifically, the average person stranded on a deserted island.

You can spot someone who’s daydreaming from a mile away. The glazed eyes, the slack lower lip, the hands positioned like adorable puppy paws. Never disturb someone in this dissociative state. They may momentarily regard you as an adversary who’s preventing them from having sex with Megan Fox and maul your face like a brown bear.

The scientific community, of course, continues to unlock these and other mysteries behind daydreams. A recent discovery pointed to a negative correlation with technology, finding the constant presence of screens and devices in our lives to be robbing our weary brains of restful daydream moments, resulting in a tragic drop in imaginary celebrity sex for all of us.

Regardless, it’s so easy to write daydreams off as needless distraction, or to blame them for all those missed highway exits, burnt slices of toast, and iPod minis sewn inside your patients. While you may never get those iPod minis back, the moments of fantasy that you’ve gained in return are well worth it. In the end, we have to learn to cherish our daydreams, to recognize them as a powerful means of escape, and to let them be our guide to a nice little bubble bath with the Olsen twins.

Illustration by Zohar Lazar.



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