Sometimes, I find myself reading pages, my eyes across lines of letters arriving at the end of the page but with no new knowledge in my brain. Or I’ll cycle from point A to B with no memory of the road in-between. My mind drifts off to other places, concepts or activities instead of focusing on the task at hand.

As kids you are told in class ‘stop daydreaming and pay attention!’. As adults, we can’t afford to daydream as much - it interferes with our work, relations or even safety. On one hand, daydreaming linked to decreased concentration, often triggered by repetitive or ‘boring’ tasks that the mind tries to make more engaging. On the other hand, letting our minds wander fuels creativity. This aspect of dreaming and creativity is explored in the surrealist art movement, which blends reality with imagination visualizing the broad spectrum of thinking about alternate realities.  

Thinking of surrealism and Dali’s elephants I wonder… do other creatures daydream? Does an animal lose focus and think about his migration route while foraging for food? Can a bot ‘think’ of another task while its sole function is to perform what it was programmed to do? To research this is a difficult exercise, but let’s say that in order to daydream, you need to be able to relive memories or think of multiple futures. When we then look at a strong emotion like grief, we could say that that is reliving the past and knowing it will not be there in the future. Grief is a feeling of loss, missing a connection to a loved one. It is a state that interferes with daily human tasks like work, and daily animal tasks like finding food or migrating. Animals that are known to grieve are elephants, monkeys, giraffes, dolphins and dogs. As for elephants, there is evidence that they can relive past moments and not only think about the present.[1]

In a smaller creature, a study has found that rats create and memorize maps in their brain and are able to remember them for several months. Maybe a rat while locked in his cage, reassess this information and let’s his mind wander, or make a mental visualization? [2]

[1] https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/harperkids/the-five-animals-that-grieve

[2] Https://www.snexplores.org/article/nobel-goes-finding-brains-gps

Daydreaming in animals is something we can imagine, although it is hard to verify. We don’t really know how they perceive the world, let alone how and when they think of things that already happened or imagine different types of futures for themselves. One creature comes to mind when thinking of daydreaming, and that’s ‘Homunculus Loxodontus’ by artist Margriet van Breevoort. This creature sits patiently in the waiting room, hands folded with open and kind eyes. It is an inanimate creature, which in the case of daydreaming is not really important. It is the internal mind we see at play by the gaze of it’s eyes.

But even more difficult is it in artificial creatures, because they are hardwired to do as intended, not to stray from a certain task. First machine that comes to mind that never complies to the task at hand is a printer. Somehow, they must have been hardwired to have a mind of their own, as they never behave like the one who inputs a task wants to.

Daydreaming is an internal process, with a hint of randomness and losing touch with the immediate surroundings. It becomes interesting when a bot behaves differently that we would expect. We see that with the work ‘My little piece of Privacy’ by Niklas Roy, a Berlin based artist. In this work, a camera registers people outside of the window. A curtain then follows these people, shielding the inside form the outside. Although this machine is not daydreaming in itself, it creates a daydreaming effect, distracting passengers from their path – while the curtain is not shielding the sun but the view.