Recording and Interpreting Work‐Related Daydreams: Effects on Vocational Self‐Concept Crystallization

During the past 2 decades, constructivist and social constructionist perspectives have become firmly established within career counseling literature and practice (Brott, 2004; Cochran, 1997; Collin & Guichard, 2011; Savickas, 2002). A fundamental tenet common to both of these perspectives is that the creation of personal narratives constitutes the process and the product of reality construction. Essentially, narratives serve to coalesce self-conceptions (i.e., values, interests, aspirations, and expectations) into a coherent yet tractable sense of self (Campbell & Ungar, 2004). From this perspective, self-concept formation is primarily an individual and psychological meaning-making process (Bujold, 2004). Career narratives reflect individuals' subjective understandings of themselves in relation to work. Narratives can portray career aspirations as well as the meaning of work in an individual's life (Cochran, 1997). The goal of career assessment and intervention from a narrative approach, therefore, is to help individuals understand how the elements and themes of their career stories shape and reshape their sense of self and influence their career decisions (Savickas, 2002). Counselors collaborate with clients in an attempt to explore objective career information embedded within clients' narratives and to create subjective interpretations of these narratives (Christensen & Johnston, 2003).Recent research suggests that work-related daydreams may serve as a central feature of a highly personalized qualitative career assessment strategy grounded in the narrative approach (Pisarik, Rowell, & Currie, 2013). Work-related daydreams often take the form of fully developed, detailed, personal stories that depict an individual within the role of work. Daydreams are accessible and tangible narratives that contextualize an array of features of one's self-concept as implemented in various life roles. Moreover, they offer a medium for clients to express personal tions and of self that are exclusively from the client's perspective.DaydreamsDaydreaming is a process in which an individual spontaneously develops a train of thought without conscious attention to immediate stimuli (Singer, 1981, 2003). Almost everyone engages in daydreaming on a daily basis (Klinger, 1990), and it is estimated that individuals devote from 30% to 50% of daily mental activity to the act of daydreaming (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). In fact, researchers suggest that daydreaming is the psychological state of consciousness that the brain naturally defaults to in the absence of a task requiring deliberate concentration (Mason, Bar, & Macrae, 2007).Daydreams have long been conceptualized as stories or narratives, often pictorial in nature. For example, in The Principles of Psychology, James (1890/1950) regarded individuals' streams of consciousness to be absorptions in fantasies and narratives, whereas Freud (1908/1959) offered a vivid example of a client's daydream that took the form of a contextually rich narrative in his essay "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." Singer (1981) referred to daydreams as "an unfolding sequence of private responses . . . 'pictures' in the mind's eye" (p. 3), which are often accompanied by vivid mental imagery. Daydreams range in content from simple recalls of past episodes to fleeting thoughts about daily concerns and elaborate fantasies about the future (Mason et al., 2007; Stawarczyk, Majerus, Van der Linden, & D'Argembeau, 2012).The ubiquity of the daydreaming phenomenon has led researchers to speculate that they serve important psychological functions. Most notably, daydreams are believed to be essential for organizing internal information, reflecting on personal goals, and planning complex future events (Stawarczyk et al., 2012). In most cases, the content of daydreams is directly related to current and salient life concerns (Klinger, 1990). Daydreams may also cohere self-schema through a reflective process and therefore contribute to the formation and maintenance of a sense of self (Klinger, 1999). …