A female student late to an important meeting finds a way to explain her tardiness to her boss.
A nervous young man going out on his first date with a woman goes over what he plans to say when he meets her.
In a hurry, a middle-aged person driving to work is ready to launch an onslaught of profanities for anyone who tries to pull out in front of him.
All of these are examples of “daydream communication,” the subject of a new book printed last month. The book is entitled “Imagined Interactions: Daydream-ing About Communication,” published by Hampton Press and written by James M. Honeycutt, a communication studies professor.
Honeycutt, who has been doing research on this subject for more than 16 years at the University, said that people daydream everyday, and through daydreaming, they experience imagined interactions. These occur when people imagine talking to individuals involved in their lives.
“It allows us to create scripts for how to interact in our lives,” Honeycutt said. “We are always looking for ways to keep our emotions stable, so we look for ways in which we can communicate with a certain individual important to us.”
According to Honeycutt, these interactions can help an individual with a job interview, a conflict situation or even a relationship, because they provide a way to rehearse messages for different situations.
“We are always seeking strategies to deal with a certain situation,” Honeycutt said. “Through rehearsal, we look for ways to do better the next time we experience the same situation.”
Dave Katz, a senior in political science, said that he rehearses before his potential confrontations.
“In a confrontation, I usually plan the first thing I’m going to say,” Katz said. “I develop a general battle plan going into the confrontation that I think is going to work. It has definitely helped me with job interviews and confrontations.”
In his book, Honeycutt examines imagined interactions with different people of various ages and cultures. He described two primary types of imagined conversations: pro-active and retroactive.
Pro-active involves people imagining conversations before they take place, and retroactive involves going over them after the conversation.
Young people tend to be more pro-active because they are future oriented. Older people tend to be more retroactive because they tend to live in the past, Honeycutt said.
An important distinction about imagined interactions is that they are not fantasies. Fantasies occur when people imagine about individuals they do not know personally, Honeycutt said.
“When I am imagining talking to George Bush, or when I am interacting in my mind with a character in a TV show, I am having a fantasy,” Honeycutt said. “In that instance, I am not imagining about someone I know.”
According to Honeycutt, daydreaming in the form of imagined interaction occurs more often in a person who is socially active than a person who is more reclusive, who experiences fantasies. The person who lives a more sedentary life has a “higher discrepancy” between what he thinks will occur in a conversation than what actually takes place. As a result, when talking to someone, this person can become awkward at times.
Megan McGlothin, a psychology senior, said she tends to stumble when she is thinking about what she plans to say.
“Sometimes I stumble when I talk, so what comes across is the total opposite of what I planned to say,” McGlothin said.
After writing this book and publishing more than two dozen articles in social science journals on this topic, Honeycutt’s research in this field continues. Currently, he is doing research on imagined interactions through music therapy, or specifically how music affects a person with road rage.
Honeycutt also lectures a course on this phenomenon. Communication Studies 3900: Imagined Interaction and Intrapersonal Communication features much of the material from his research, as well as his book.