Winter dreams can make for a great road trip season

by Chris Owen on

Road trip season is more the stuff of winter dreams than reality this time of year. Snow, ice, frozen windshields and bad weather are not good reasons to get us in the car and out on the road. Broke after the holidays, cabin-fever starting to set in, it seems only natural to daydream about being someplace else. Psychologists say that’s perfectly normal and might even be helpful to planning future travels.

“Daydreaming is characterized by a shift of attention away from focusing on a physical or mental task to a series of thoughts derived from long-term memory (often taking a narrative form)” Psychologists Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer say in Scientific American.

Maybe now is the time to pull up those photos from the last road trip, vacation or travel of any kind and re-live those memories. Apparently, we might already be thinking of them anyway.Daydreaming, or mind-wandering “may serve multiple adaptive functions, such as future planning, sorting out current concerns, cycling through different information streams, distributed learning (vs. cramming), and creativity” note Kaufman and Singer.

In other words, when we daydream we may appear to be doing nothing but in reality, things are going on behind the scenes, much like a computer might perform routine maintenance tasks that are also not displayed.

This video tells more about how daydreaming can result in some of the best, most creative travel plans. Pay attention. Really.




Flickr photo by strudelt

Beautiful Cities in Dreams

by Adrienne Wilson on

Isn’t funny how our dreams can
capture places we’ve never been, yet only seen on TV or in some glossy magazine with such detail and color, that you
would wake having sworn you had been? For some of you, your journey to Paris or Prague will only take place during the
dark hours of night, while others will twirl pencils for moments on end, daydreaming about being anywhere, but in the
office. Then there are the very lucky few who will one day be actually strolling down a bustling Tokyo street on a
beautiful morning to later stumble into the Watari Museum of
Contemporary Art. Photography, sculpture and installation enthusiasts will be happy to find and to know that they
are neither sleep walking or in the Twilight Zone, but at I Love Art 8’s "Beautiful Cities in
Dreams" exhibit running for another 52 days in Tokyo.

Over 100 works by 13 photographers will
allow visitors to the museum to encounter cities from which they’ve probably dreamed about at least once or twice and
if they haven’t before they’ll be dreaming about afterwards. Some of the artists include August Sander, Man Ray, Diane
Arbus, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, Olaf Nicolai and more.Sounds like an awesome little event to explore while in Japan
and if you’re hip to the lingo you’ll find more details available at the museum
website, but only in Japanese. Check out Tokyo Art Beat
for a few more details to better help you if you’re around the town.

via Tokyo Art Beat