Daydreaming Through Life

How long do daydreams last? Eric Klinger ran a study in which he trained a group of participants to estimate the duration of their thoughts, daydreams or otherwise. What he found was that the average thought length was fourteen seconds, but there were more thoughts that were about five seconds long than there were of any other length.

That the mean is so much higher than the median suggests that we have some very long daydreams that bring the average up so high. Every single day, a typical person entertains about four thousand thoughts during their waking hours. If we use, as a working definition of daydreaming, that it consists of thoughts that are either spontaneous or fanciful, then fully half of these thoughts are daydreams—two thousand per day!