Day-dreaming is good for health

Ever got engaged in a fanciful musing of a castle in the air, or a date with Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt?


Daydreaming has long been derided as a lazy and non-productive pastime. But it has also been able to breed many popular artistic careers, like being a composer, novelist or a film-maker, who develop new ideas.

"When a person is thinking or fantasizing about his unfulfilled wishes, desires, all that for which he is passionate about, he gets carried away by them and starts day-dreaming," says a well known psychologist Dr Aruna Broota.

But, in this fast-pace world, do people have time for day-dreaming?

"Yes, they have enough time to day-dream. The fast-pace moving world has not deterred people from day-dreaming," says Dr Roma Kumar, the clinical psychologist at Ganga Ram Hospital.

Day-dreaming is a visionary fantasy or a reverie indulged in while awake. A daydreamer gets engaged in a fancy speculation, generally of happy and pleasant moments, hopes or ambitions. While for an observer, the day-dreamer has an expression-less stare to a distance, day-dreaming is very normal, feel experts.

"Day-dreaming is completely normal, in fact it is more than normal. It is like trying to think of the happy moments. The person goes back to that time to get more happiness," says Kumar.

Kumar however, adds that day-dreaming can be abnormal if it is beyond a limit.

"Generally day-dreaming is normal but if it is beyond certain limit and when it makes the person non-functional, it can be an obstacle on the path of progress," she says.