Musical Daydreaming and Kinds of Consciousness

Musical daydreams are a common occurrence in everyday life, yet study of such experiences has tended to focus on function, frequency plus the relationship between visual imagery, musical attributes (such as tempo, valence) and neural correlates. The phenomenology (subjective feel) of real-world episodes of mind-wandering in conjunction with music remains a less charted area. In this chapter I draw on qualitative data from several research projects to highlight some key characteristics of musical daydreaming, including narrative versus non-linear structure, associations and memories versus spontaneous, contingent imagery, temporal compression or suspension, involvement, detachment, arousal levels, distributed attention, age-related differences in the content and structure of musical daydreams and the phenomenology of multimodal listening, linking examples to conceptualisations of kinds of consciousness. I also explore chronobiological and evolutionary psychological perspectives on daydreaming, including speculation concerning the relationship between daydreaming, time of day and arousal levels (biological cyclicity); similarities and differences between musical daydreams and musical night-dreams; the extent to which musical daydreaming constitutes an adaptive or maladaptive coping mechanism.