A Private Theatre? Daydreaming as a Cultural Practice

Why have ethnologists and folklorists shown such little interest in the rich world of daydreaming, Inger Lövkrona (2001: 61) asks in a paper on sexual fantasies. It is a field of research dominated by psychologists, often with a psychoanalytical perspective. How can a cultural analysis be made of what at first glance seems like very private fantasy worlds? What happens if we view these daydreams as cultural products, shaped by the social contexts and historical epochs in which they exist?, Lövkrona tries a contrastive approach and compares the contemporary material with texts on erotic daydreams in traditional peasant folklore. Setting the stage In the following we want to use a similar approach of historical contrast to contextualize daydreaming, drawing on an ongoing project about what is happening when you seemingly are “doing nothing ” (see Ehn & Löfgren 2007 and 2009). We have been moving around in the history of mindwandering, trying to grasp for example what gender, class and generation does to this mundane and often ignored pasttime. We have looked at it as an everyday habit, a kind of mental work. Where, when and how do people daydream? Daydreaming and imagination – expressed in stories, myths, and songs – have always been part of life in every society. They are universal activities that take up much more of people’s time than they probably are aware of. There are psychologists that argue that more than a quarter of our waken time involves daydreaming (Klinger 1990:6), but still it is an activity that most of us seldom think 3