Daydreams and the Function of Fantasy

"We all daydream and yet the purpose of waking fantasy, or episodes of conscious and private fiction-making, has never been really clarified. Instead, mainstream psychology characterises the daydream as task-distracted mind wandering, which does little to explain why people engage in creating fictions of often unrealizable proportions regularly for themselves, at times incidentally and at other times deliberately. This work overturns, re-organises and redefines established concepts of the role of waking fantasy in human life. It shows how the purpose of all fantasy is to transform mood states into specific emotional responses, a feature apparent in daydreams, sexual fantasies and even unconscious fantasy structures. Understanding how feeling states motivate fantasy explains why we daydream at all, how repetitive daydreams and sexual fantasies develop to elicit reliable emotional reactions, and even how we at times use and appropriate published or released fictional works to propagate our own fantasies. Along the way, the work explores the relation of waking fantasy to some of our buying practices, attachments to objects in early childhood, preferred genres of fiction and cultural phenomena such as the worship of celebrities. "--

List of contents

1. Obsessive Fans and Daydreaming Computers - A New Model of Daydreaming 2. Empirical Studies on Daydreaming 3. The Major Models of Daydreaming 4. Frequent Daydreaming Populations and Systems of Fantasy Immersion 5. The Inner Workings of Fantasy: Daydreams as Natural Advertisements 6. Celebrity Worship and Fantasy Immersion 7. Escapes into Fiction: Violent Sexual Fantasy, Magical Reversal and Human Sexuality 8. The Origins of Daydreaming: Self-Soothing Practices in Early Childhood 9. General Conclusions

Product details

• Authors: M Regis, M. Regis, Meta Regis
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 20.09.2013
• EAN: 9781137300768
• ISBN: 978-1-137-30076-8
• No. of pages: 280
• Subjects: Guides > Spirituality > Esoterics; Humanities, art, music > Psychology; Non-fiction book > Psychology, esoterics, spirituality, anthroposophy > Applied psychology; B, Emotion, Cultural Studies, Psychology, personality, Psychology: emotions, Emotions, Social Psychology, Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality, Cognition & cognitive psychology, Psychology Research, Behavioral Sciences and Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Differential Psychology, cognitive psychology, Psychological methodology, Popular Science in Psychology, Experiential research, Palgrave Social Sciences Collection, Daydreams;fantasy;emotion;mind;psychology