The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has discovered a link between insomnia and daydreaming.

Primary insomnia is a form of the condition where the persons sleep is interrupted when they are not suffering from any other condition, pain or problems with medication or substance abuse.  The link revealed that daydreamers are more likely to be insomniacs as the regions of the brain associated with wandering thoughts do not shut down when given complex tasks, meaning sufferers usually put more effort into daytime jobs than good sleepers.

Dr Drummond, lead researcher and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, commented: “People with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping at night, but their brains are not functioning as effectively during the day.  We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off ‘mind wandering’ brain regions irrelevant to the task.”  The research looked at MRI scans of 50 sleepers, half regular and half insomniacs, with an average age of 32.  It is published in the Journal.