What If Your Daydreams Were Trying to Tell You Something?

The surprising science behind why your wandering mind may be receiving intuitive insight

I’ve been thinking about daydreaming lately—how as a child, and even now, it can feel like complete immersion. This feeling of stepping out of this reality and into an alternate version, or perhaps somewhere else entirely.

I’ve been thinking about it because I was recently invited to give a talk at an event. So I started thinking about the topics I wanted to discuss, and bam—off to daydream land I went. Rehearsing some of the topics, discovering new ones, sometimes even daydreaming about a question being asked of me and using that as inspiration.

A Core Memory

Daydreaming was a significant part of my childhood too. I have a vivid memory of my grade school classroom. It had a massive wall of windows stretching from the ceiling to the counters. I’d look up from my desk, catch the sky and clouds drifting by, and just like that—poof—I was gone into another state of mind. One second the teacher was at the chalkboard, and the next, I’d turned my head and slipped into an entirely different world.

I most certainly had calls from the school to my parents about me being in the clouds during class. Funny enough—real quick sidebar—it got to the point that my parents had me evaluated by an educational psychologist to see what was “wrong” with me. Turns out, I tested off the charts, and the counselor recommended I be pulled from the school and placed in a program for gifted children. They didn’t pull me, though, because I was raised in a small religious community, and my mom told me she cared more about my soul making it back to heaven than my academic education.

Boxes We’re Taught to Fit

What’s fascinating to me is that so much of what our natural inclinations are as children—and adults—is part of how we naturally connect to spirit and navigate the world. But society creates boxes to fit people in to make things easier and/or easier to control. I can’t totally blame it, either. I get the impulse—my life runs smoother when my kids color inside the lines too. But smoother isn’t always what a soul needs.

The Science of the Daydream

Recently, I came out of a deep daydreaming cycle. Mine tend to last weeks or months, and this one was fueled by getting hyper-focused on the bones of my speech. Once I surfaced, I started really pondering the act of daydreaming itself.

As a Spiritual Gifts Mentor and Spiritual Guide, I’ve been working in the arena of psychic development long enough to know when I’m tapping into something “other” (honestly, most everything in life is otherworldly, but for simplicity let’s keep it to this). When daydreaming is done positively, with a seed of intent, it takes a form very similar to how some psychics tap into spiritual information and insight. If I had to categorize it, I’d say it’s akin to what mainstream people would call a strong intuitive experience.

Here’s why: science shows that when we daydream, our brain slips into Alpha—the same wave state as night dreaming and deep creativity, and the gentle on-ramp toward Theta, where the veil gets even thinner. I believe that’s no accident: daydreaming opens the same subconscious gateway Spirit uses to send you messages at night—only now, you’re awake to consciously catch the download.

As a certified dream interpreter and spiritual mentor, I know that night dreams are direct messages from Spirit. When you decode them, you hold a powerful tool to deeply understand who you are, why you’re here, and how to live in alignment. The exact same magic can happen while you’re wide awake. Just like with night dreams, there are ways to shift into daydreaming so it becomes productive and insightful, preventing your ego from running the show. Most importantly, because you’re conscious while it’s happening, it’s easier to decode what your daydream is telling you and catch the inspiration as it comes.

Not All Daydreaming Is Created Equal

If you’re human, you’ve likely had some negative daydreaming going on at some point — ruminating, obsessing, or letting your inner critic run the show and calling it daydreaming. That type of daydreaming is called maladaptive daydreaming. It’s when you catastrophize, worry, negative-guilty daydreams, ruminate – let’s not do that ok. 

If you find yourself doing this, pay attention to what’s coming up. It’s guidance—a message about something that needs healing or tending to. Be gentle with yourself, recognize it for what it is, and seek support or self-care if you need it.

The 5-Step Daydreaming Method

I’m sharing a process of daydreaming that I loosely have used since childhood. Honestly, I feel silly even sharing this process below because daydreaming feels so…natural and intuitive maybe. But I’m going to anyway.

Also, adding that daydreaming can also be a type of escapism, and that’s an easy tell that something other than your higher self has taken the wheel. Do I ever indulge in daydreaming as a way of escapism? I have! And here’s why: if I’m dreaming it, I know there’s a sliver of possibility, or some fundamental truth at hand. Sometimes I’ll even encourage myself to daydream big and let my imagination have a heyday—because I’m curious to see what my little heart might be desiring to experience but hasn’t been brave enough to voice until I unleash it.

To activate productive daydreaming—the kind where downloads, insights, and aha’s emerge—here are the steps:

Step 1: Lower the Cognitive Load (The Setup)
Your logical mind can’t step back if your brain is busy processing heavy external data.

• The Action: Engage in a low-demand, automatic physical task—walking a familiar path, folding laundry, washing dishes.
• The Alpha Connection: Rhythmic, repetitive movement quiets the brain’s executive control centers, shifting you out of high-focus Beta waves and into a relaxed Alpha rhythm.
• The Spiritual Frame: This creates a gentle, waking trance—a runway for spiritual energy to enter your awareness. The experience is “spacing out.”

Step 2: Set a “Seed Intent” (The Incubation)
Productive daydreaming is unconstrained, but it benefits from a loose anchor.

• The Action: Before you space out, gently hold a single question, topic, or image in your mind for 30 seconds. Don’t try to solve it or stress over it.
• The Alpha Connection: This primes your memory networks, signaling to your subconscious exactly which files to open once you drop into Alpha.
• The Spiritual Frame: It’s the waking equivalent of setting an intention before sleep to prompt a specific night dream.

Step 3: Soften Your Focus (The Transition)
To let your inner vision take over, you have to consciously stop tracking the physical world.

• The Action: Defocus your eyes. Gaze out a window at the sky, or at a blank wall, letting your peripheral vision take over. Or if you’re in motion—like on a walk or folding laundry—just let your focus become secondary. Sorta what happens when you’re eating and watching TV. You’re really only focused on one of those things—ya feel me.
• The Alpha Connection: Hard, sharp visual focus keeps the brain in high-alert Beta. Defocusing your eyes is one of the fastest ways to spike Alpha production across the cortex.
• The Spiritual Frame: You’re shifting your sight from your physical eyes to your inner landscape—your Third Eye.

Step 4: Practice Non-Judgmental Witnessing (The Flow)
This is where most people self-interrupt—panicking, calling daydreaming a “waste of time,” and shutting the process down.

• The Action: Follow your thoughts wherever they wander. If strange symbols, childhood memories, or bizarre metaphors surface, let them flow without judging them.
• The Alpha Connection: With the analytical mind offline, your subconscious speaks its native language—symbols and metaphors.
• The Spiritual Frame: Treat the daydream exactly like a night dream. Don’t analyze the imagery while it’s happening. Just witness it.

Step 5: Capture the Waking Download (The Retrieval)
Alpha states are fluid—the moment you snap back into logical thinking, the insight can evaporate as fast as it came.

Keep a journal or voice recorder within arm’s reach. The instant an aha, a vivid image, or a strong feeling hits, get it down before your waking logic overwrites it and the moment gets lost to Beta-wave noise. This is the step people skip most—and the one that turns a nice daydream into something you can actually use.

What It Looks Like for Me

When I enter these daydream states, I’m usually exploring my deep interests, or allowing new ideas to bubble up so I can capture them and take action. It acts as a mental dress rehearsal, allowing full immersion into an experience or idea. Yes, I need to quickly drop a line in my notes app or voice memo to capture whatever comes up before it flits away. Though I’ve found that if I re-enter the daydream, I can sometimes recover the fleeting messages I missed the first time.

Even now, as I write this, I take a beat to stare out the window. My mind is blank, but it isn’t. It is creating space for what wants to emerge—a daydream dalliance with creativity.