The Importance of Daydreaming and Freeing your Imagination…

I write about dreams, about believing in yourself
and reaching for those dreams that inspire you.
The tagline for Beneath the Rainbow is
‘It’s those silly dreams that keep us alive.’
And it really is!

© Bekah Shambrook

Were you the child who got told off at school for gazing out of the window, watching the clouds sail across the sky whilst you should have been learning Pythagoras?

Did you spend time staring into space as dust motes danced through rays of sunshine?

Do you lose yourself in your own mind as rain drums on your windowpane?

Has your boss tapped you on the shoulder as your muse tempts you and files rest unopened on your desk?

Unorganised thought, seeds of inspiration, moments of clarity – can all accompany daydreaming. There is a place for allowing our minds to wander, a place for letting our unconscious play, and it can benefit us.

Some of the greatest minds have come up with their ‘Eureka!’ moments through daydreaming, Richard Branson and Albert Einstein being just two of them.

Scott Barry Kaufman a psychology professor from NYU suggests expanding the list of intelligences to include “spontaneous” cognitive skills like intuition and sudden insights, which are only accessed by letting your mind ramble. So when you got told off for daydreaming many years ago, or just yesterday, know that daydreaming skills are another type of intelligence!

You use the most intricate parts of your brain when you tap into your memory banks and you can experience things that are locked when you are thinking about specific things or tasks.

Free your mind!

© Lisa Shambrook

I’ve found it a natural way to help release stress and anxiety. It’s perhaps the opposite, or maybe companion, to mindfulness in that daydreaming lets your mind wander in an unstructured way, and free thought can be very inspirational.

Giving yourself to your mind’s ramblings can help you unlock the stresses of the day and help inspire you.

It’s also said that depression often kills daydreams, leaving the sufferer feeling flat and low. I’ve had times when my conscious has wiped out my dreams, leaving me only with nightmares, and life becomes one dimensional and hope fades away.

When daydreams or musings exist in my mind there is always hope.

© Lisa Shambrook

Dreaming in the cold light of day binds both the conditions above, it provides motivation. Remember those famous words “I have a dream…”? Martin Luther King Jr acted on his dream and changed history.  Read the transcript of his speech and feel the inspiration, the strength, the hope, and motivation and discover your own dreams.

Daydreaming about our own lives helps us imagine, visualise and make choices about events before they happen, or they can inspire us to make changes.

They can literally change our lives.

© Lisa Shambrook (and this is my cat Raven…see what I did there…)

Where does creativity come from? It’s a mixture of dreams and motivation and action. Daydreaming is our imagination and our imagination is boundless, we can see anything in our mind’s eye and we can free-associate, which leads to both creativity and problem solving.

Our mind can see and go far beyond that which we can physically reach, thereby opening huge potential, wild ideas and even the surreal. It can break us free from the confines of logical thinking and introduce us to the lateral, the unusual and the downright odd.  

‘Perhaps imagination is intelligence having fun,’ said George Scialabba.

Daydreaming can create works of art, music, movies, books and much, much more.

So, take some time out and daydream…

Great advice found in the Nov 2012 Reader’s Digest

After all, Eleanor Roosevelt said
‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.’  

Go and find yours…daydream until your muse inspires you…

© Lisa Shambrook

“Those silly dreams are what keep us alive…”
Old Thomas has a dream…one that seems way out of his reach. When he talks about it, it’s with a wry smile and a sigh. Others live his dream while he watches on the side-lines. Will he achieve his last dream, the one that keeps him alive?

Find out in ‘Beneath the Rainbow’ available on Amazon in Paperback and eBook.

Five Sentence Fiction: Forgotten

Dream Scene by Bekah Shambrook (Please do not use without permission)

“So let me tell you about last night, there I was all curled up cosy, head beneath the duvet, heavy breathing, not for any sordid reason mind, just to warm up the icy bed…and my mind began to wander. That half hour, you know the one, before sleep overcomes consciousness, is precious and thoughts of all kinds swim in the murky depths of my brain. No point letting the day’s events wallow, don’t need to rehash that which I can’t change, so I think, I muse, I ruminate – the cogs turn and the gears jump and my imagination escapes with me…
So last night, just before succumbing to slumber, I had the mother of all ideas, the biggest twist and the most amazing denouement in all of history – the best ever best-seller planned out in the utmost detail, right there in my head!
Now I sit with the humming of my laptop heckling me and an illumined blank page scorning my brain as I delve deep inside in vain…and my novel, my best-seller, my way out of here, in the bright light of day – is all but forgotten…”

Written, tongue-in-cheek for Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction check out the other writers in this week’s prompt: Forgotten.

Five Sentence Fiction: Inspire

Photo By Lisa Shambrook www.flickr.com

She’d sailed the seven seas, single-handed, in a tin boat, thwarting pirates and sea monsters…and huge octopus, tentacled things.

She’d prepared banquets for lords and ladies, with the finest of menu’s written in glittering gold on the finest emerald paper, with cupcakes and chocolate dessert.

She had conquered the final frontier, flown amid the stars in the cockpit of her silver rocket, discovering new planets and greeting aliens in green.

She married Prince Charming and climbed the castle’s crumbling tower, and proclaimed her love and devotion to her loyal subjects below.

“Time’s up sweetie!” came the call, and her mother wandered up the garden path gathering teddies and dolls up into the old tin bath, chuckling at the soggy mud-pies sitting atop gold-glittered leaves,  and she called her daughter down from the tree, smiling at her tattered wings and the happy-tired grin on her face. 

Written for Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction 

Take a look at the other entries…

Thank You for Believing in Me

Many bloggers are contemplative during January, looking back and looking forward…I want to use this post to say THANK YOU. 
Thank you to everyone who has supported my writing and my blog, and to all who’ve taken time to comment on my pages, or review my book!

This time last year I began getting to know some amazing writers and readers online: Blogs, Twitter and Facebook…and I’d like to share a post I wrote a year ago (before I knew many of you!). Thank you for believing in me!

The Future belongs to Those who Believe in the Beauty of their Dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt had it exactly right…the future really does belong to those who believe in their dreams…

How many of us started out with huge dreams…the kind that stretched far, far beyond what we can see? How many of us played in the woods building forts and defending them from intruders and dragons, or by the ocean building sand castles and trenches? Were you so lost in books that you felt the Famous Five were your best friends? Did you skirt the local park with dark glasses searching for villains and opportunities to spy or use your magic super powers? Did you build Lego towns and fill them with adventure? Did you play ‘Pooh Sticks’ or race paper boats down the river? Did you draw fantastical pictures and wait at night for them to come alive? Were your stories so magical you slipped into them when you dreamed at night? Did you make mud pies and feed a family of dolls and teddy bears? Did you dream? Did you have dreams so strong you were sure you would achieve them?

I did…I knew exactly what I wanted as a child… I wanted to own horses, to spend my days galloping across mountains and valleys… I wanted to live by the ocean and swim in the sea every day… I wanted to write and see my stories published… I wanted to draw and paint and illustrate… Yes, I had dreams…

To be truthful, some were just childhood imaginings, fun, playtime. I was never going to live in the forest and defend my homestead from dragons…
I had ambition, as a child I wanted to write and draw, and I did, making books from A5 paper…I devoured Cicely Mary Barker’s ‘Flower Fairies’ and made up my own, stapling pages together and inventing rhymes to go with them. I bought tiny A6 notepads and wrote stories, lost in a world of my own. I drew, sitting on my bed with a sketch pad, my tongue protruding as I concentrated on my art, sketching for hours.

Images by Lisa Shambrook (Please do not use)

My dreams grew with aspirations and ideas as I got older, just as my art did. From the crude pencil drawings of a ten-year-old, to more sophistication at thirteen and more mature at nineteen. My dreams grew up…but not always in a good way. I became cynical and reserved in my dreams, trying to think of things that could actually happen, things that weren’t too lofty for me to achieve…and perhaps that’s just where I began to lose them…

I began to doubt myself, my ability and question the reality of the things I once wanted. Was I good enough to illustrate, or to write something that people, real people, would actually want to read? That doubt, along with the realities of life, leaving school, getting a job, getting married and having children, stopped me from pursuing those things I’d dreamed of all my childhood.

I don’t blame anyone, I just let life take over and my dreams faded like an old masterpiece hung on a wall that no one does more than glance at, left to saturate in the glare of every day sun.
I could have been more than the sum of what I am right now…that does make me sad…there is so much more I could have achieved. It was when I was thirty that I decided I could become more, that those old buried dreams deserved a second look. And I began to write.

Self-belief has taken a lot longer…however, slowly over the years those shattered dreams have come alive, my writing has fed my aspirations and words that I thought would never interest anyone have become the tool for rebuilding those dreams.

So, yes, it’s true I have never found myself dwelling in the woods defending my little wooden fort from all things evil, but those dragons I used to chase off in my imagination, now live on paper. I believe in them, I believe in me…and that’s where it all starts…the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams…I intend to believe in mine.

Once again, thank you for believing in me!