While Klein was primarily conceiving of this peremptory ideation operating when we are awaking (and influencing how we see and interact in our waking world), I have noted in previous essays that there is no reason to believe that it is not also operating when we are asleep. Furthermore, without the correctives of conscious processing of incoming stimuli during our waking hours, we might find that multiple peremptory ideations are moving about and bumping into each other when we are asleep. The state of generativity might be operating in full force during our sleep and when we first awake, precisely because one or more preemptory ideational trains are passing by.
Structure and Dynamics of Dreams: Varieties
Given these different properties of dreams, I turn to the many varieties of dream that are commonly found (or not so commonly found) in the domain of sleep, where we spend many hours each day.
Daydreams
We go through cycles all day long—when we are awake and when we are sleeping. It is not surprising, therefore, that we generate dreamy states during the day when we are moving through a sleeplike cycle. Of course, we might also daydream when we are bored, when we are frustrated with the current state of affairs, or when we simply prefer to live in an “alternative world.” All of these states are likely to occur frequently during our childhood.
Furthermore, as children, daydreaming is enhanced by the constraints imposed on our preferred circadian cycle. While our wake and sleep cycle as children often pushes us toward a later time to sleep and a later time to wake, we are commonly regimented by a wake and sleep schedule that fits more with our parents and school system than with our own childhood cycle. We thus sit in a boring classroom, as a child, feel sleepy, and are drawn into a state of daytime dreaming.
While daydreaming might be demeaned as a dysfunctional process of childhood (“we should grow beyond our daydreams”), this form of dreaming is commonplace. The American Psychological Association suggests that up to one-third — and in some cases, one-half — of our waking thoughts are daydreams. Daydreaming is particularly common during midday. It may often disguise the need of human beings at all ages for sleep at midday.
Many societies permit (or even encourage) siestas in the early afternoon. In my teaching of adults from Asia, there was often an hour taken after lunch for a brief nap. I have taken to napping in the early afternoon during my current retirement years. Deirdre Barrett (2001) even encourages the use of afternoon naps as a way to bring in the “committee of sleep” to solve problems we are facing, whether as corporate executives or authors of pulp fiction. I will be devoting an entire essay in this series to a more extended analysis of Barrett’s important work.
I find most daydreams to be rather short and often “fleeting” (fast burning). Though they take place during the day, daydreams are often quite generative—they tend to take us far away from our current world (whether it be a stuffy New England classroom or one of Márquez’s sultry Mexican bedrooms).
