Why emptying your mind is about to become the hottest ticket in town

Every morning when I don’t have to be somewhere else, I take my coffee out to the creaky swing seat for a spot of staring. There is a Japanese word for this: Boketto – the art of staring vacantly into the distance while thinking of nothing – outward gaze, inward silence. The word comes from daydreaming, those “airy nothings” that Shakespeare said found form through the poet’s pen. I used to bring my notebook with me in case inspiration struck, but soon found that the staring felt like activity enough.

Going blank is a way to reset after the night’s subconscious adventures. It also helps to stave off the current stresses about being alive in 2025 (fascists, AI, getting old, the price of parmesan). Maybe the activity is in the struggle to stay blank. The human brain is wired to wander. If you’ve ever tried meditation you’ll know how hard it can be to shut out the clattering world. The trick is to be OK with tuning in and out, to accept the static for what it is.

“My eyes make pictures when they are shut,” Coleridge begins in A Day Dream. He goes on in a romantic fashion to describe a time between friends now passed. For Coleridge, the act of writing a poem was the realisation of a waking dream. It was something he, on occasion, wished to be emancipated from. He was also addicted to laudanum – opium dissolved in alcohol – which is another way to go blank, I guess.

I have always been a daydreamer, and always felt slightly guilty about it. When I was growing up, no one explicitly said that daydreaming was bad (Ecclesiastes 5:3 aside) but I definitely got the impression that to be so willing to fall into fantasy was a sign of immaturity or mental weakness.

Simmone Howell: “I have always been a daydreamer, and always felt slightly guilty about it.″⁣

In childhood, my Saturday afternoon movie habit prompted daydreams with maximalist set-design, very Vincente Minnelli; I dreamed of magic carpets and faraway lands, exotica and riches. Later, my daydreams were more mundane: romance and pop stars, taffeta and a clear complexion. Research tells us that the longer we live, the less we daydream, and that for those living with dementia, the capacity to daydream, that inner monologue, is lost altogether.

In Creative Writers and Daydreaming (1908), Sigmund Freud asserted that daydreams (or “phantasies”), like night dreams, were mainly about wish-fulfillment – ambitious wishes or erotic ones: “the wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct on the pattern of the past a picture of the future.” He saw that some daydreams ran the risk of being “over-luxuriant and over-powerful” and was wary about the effects of making private thoughts public.

Clinical psychologist Jerome L. Singer observed that the fact of its privacy made daydreaming difficult to define, and that while it may start due to stimulus, the mental drift that occurs – “an unfolding sequence of private responses” – follows its own mysterious compass. In the early 1960s, Singer and John S. Antrobus created the Imaginal Process Inventory to investigate daydreaming and the range of human thought.

Some sample questions: “In my daydreams I lose my job and am financially in debt, and feel worthless”; “I daydream about saving a drowning child”; and “My daydreams are as weird as science fiction”. Singer found that the most common daydreams circled “sexual satisfaction, altruistic attitudes, unusual good fortune and various magical possibilities that are much less likely to occur in [the daydreamer’s] individual lives”.

He identified three daydreaming “styles”: anxious/distractible, guilty/dysphoric, and positive-vivid. For the anxious, daydreaming was often an unwelcome experience, and those in this camp had poor attention control; for the guilty it might lead to increased self-awareness, and a propensity to drink; those who scored high in positive-vivid – most people, it turned out – were the “happy daydreamers”. Before Singer and co’s research, American psychologists associated daydreaming with psychopathology; after, it became accepted as a normal, common, and adaptive human phenomenon.

For those living with dementia, the capacity to daydream, that inner monologue, is lost altogether.

Today the benefits of daydreaming are much spruiked: mind wandering is conducive to problem-solving; it fosters imagination, it allows individuals to anticipate and trial future scenarios, it helps alleviate boredom (remember boredom?) but you can have too much of a good thing. In 2002, Eli Somer coined the term “maladaptive daydreaming” for people whose daydreaming interfered with their reality in unhelpful ways.

In the digital arts platform We Present, a 54-year-old woman describes her daydreaming as totalising: “I get trapped in a world that I have been thrown into, like being tied to a chair and forced to watch a film.” A 16-year-old girl with a four-hour-a-day habit confesses, “I don’t know myself that well; I know my daydream self better.”

The International Society for Maladaptive Daydreaming was established in 2024. Maladaptive Daydreamers Anonymous claims members can quit by adhering to a 12-step program. Online support groups offer accountability buddies, education, and a safe space for people affected by MD to talk about their daydreams.

If Freud was the alarmist, Singer set the rational middle ground: “Our task as mature adults is not to ignore the more private set of experiences in favour of close attention to the external environment, but rather gradually to learn the conditions under which we can use both sources of stimulation for adaptive purposes.”

I like Freud’s term for creative writers – “dreamers in broad daylight”. Where I’ve often thought of my writing as making something out of nothing, lately I’m more inclined to go the other way. In How to be Free, just before smartphones, Tom Hodgkinson lamented: “Sometimes I think that life is becoming no more than staring at a screen”. I feel this keenly – what are we all looking for?

For artist and writer Jenny Odell, the antidote to the constant bombardment of stimulus in our accelerated culture is going blank. This is both a philosophical stance, and a form of activism. “To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”

Participants in Woopsyang’s Space-Out Competition strive to be the stillest of them all. Credit: Rising Festival

South Korean artist Woopsyang has elevated this to a global communal experience with her Space-Out Competition. After suffering burnout from her career in advertising, then feeling guilt about being unproductive, the artist decided on a new aim: to do nothing. Since 2014, participants around the world have taken up her initiative to sit for 90 minutes without paying attention to what is going on around them, which is a whole lot of nothing. The audience votes on aesthetics (participants dress up in costumes that relate to their “busy” working life) while technical scores come from measuring the participants’ heart-rates – the lowest and steadiest wins.

The prize is a gold trophy modelled after Rodin’s The Thinker and free travel to the next competition to pass on the mantle of Most Chill to the next winner. Ninety minutes sounds like a lot, but it is less than half my average daily screen time, reported to me by my iPhone every Monday morning without guile or glee. Woopsyang is bringing her competition to Melbourne’s Rising Festival in June. Maybe I’ll see you there? Until then, I’ll be on the swing seat, staring at nothing, trying to find the still, small place inside.

Space-Out Competition is at QV Melbourne on June 9; applications at 2025.rising.melbourne. The Rising Festival runs June 4-15.