Mind Wandering and Water Metaphors: Towards a Reconceptualisation of Immersion and Fictional Worlds

Abstract

Mind wandering is a mental activity that occupies up to 50% of our waking time. While scientists have now started to acknowledge and to study the creative potential of mind wandering for our imaginative skills, fiction has long recognised its value. This article focuses on the depiction of mind wandering in fiction, with examples ranging from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to Ayumu Watanabe’s movie Children of the Sea. In particular, I focus on how images related to water are employed in this respect. It appears that water-related metaphors and imagery are particularly significant for the depiction of the interlacement between mind wandering and processes of creativity connected to fiction. This article argues that the notion of fictional world per se can be enriched and better conceptualised as a less “fixed” entity if pictured as a fluid, stream-like mental construct, shaped by imaginative engagement and mind wandering.

“Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass. But it is very deep too. It goes down deeper than any anchor rope will go, and many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea.”

(Andersen [1837] 2019)

“Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they reached fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.”.

(Woolf 2015, p. 42)

1. Introduction

This article discusses the complex interrelations among mind wandering, fictional worlds, imagination, and water imagery. The main argument is that mind wandering constitutes an integral and relevant cognitive act characterising our mental interaction with fictional worlds—and that it does not equate with negatively connotated distraction. This argument challenges a long-established idea that deep, sustained attention is what the phenomenon of immersion (a notion that has been used for many years in narrative theory) entails. I maintain that mind wandering is also part of immersion—and that the essential role it plays may call for a more dynamic and fluid definition of the fictional world itself. The way in which this claim is supported is also through the employment of water images and metaphors: water imagery to be found in fictional contexts functions as a powerful tool to emphasise the role of mind wandering in reception processes.

After a first introductory part on the methodology and on the selection of the case studies, the article is divided into four sections. In the first one, I discuss the concept of immersion in a fictional world as based on water metaphors. I mention some well-known relevant theories about fictional worlds and the related concept of deep attention, and I introduce the idea that mind wandering can be, too, a part of the reception process—suggesting that the sharp dichotomy attention—mind wandering can be detrimental for a thorough account of our cognitive interaction with fiction. In the second part, I talk more in-depth about mind wandering, providing some scientific background and framework, particularly in relation to deliberate mind wandering and its proven connection with imagination and creativity. In the third section, I employ different case studies (Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Ayumu Watanabe’s Children of the Sea) to draw a link between water imagery and mind wandering. As I explain more in detail in the next section, the selection of case studies is based on a broad definition of “literary text” that encompasses different genres and media. The aim is to demonstrate that water imagery as a representation of our imaginative interaction with fiction is widespread across media and genres. The notion of “fictional world” itself is linked to multiple fictional dimensions, both in terms of medium and of genre (see Ryan 2015). Based also on the examples provided in the case studies, I propose the term “fictional stream” as an alternative way to describe our cognitive reception of fictional worlds—one that provides a more comprehensive account, also highlighting the importance of mind wandering.

The fourth part of the article uses the same case studies again to discuss how hydrological images in fiction stress in a metaphorical way the creative dimension of mind wandering.

This article is theory-based—its purposes are to suggest novel ways of looking at mind wandering and fictional worlds, and to raise questions that can also be empirically tested. I use examples from fiction, considering different genres and media, to showcase that water imagery can offer crucial metaphors for the conceptualisation of fictional worlds and of our cognitive relation with them. All these case studies offer metafictional reflections on how we mentally interact with fiction, and they do so by using aquatic metaphors. The way in which water imagery is employed in relation to fiction and to mind wandering in the fictional context helps strengthen my theoretical claims. The authors of my case studies employ water-based images and metaphors to talk about how fiction impacts the imagination of the recipients, depicting mind wandering and immersion through the medium of fiction itself. I make use of these examples to substantiate my own theory. This approach is speculative: whether these water metaphors also trigger a deliberate form of mind wandering in the readers’ minds remains to be empirically tested. As a first theoretical step I argue that these water metaphors related to immersion and mind wandering are rooted in embodied conceptual metaphors and this can facilitate a certain kind of cognitive response in the readers’ minds. I contend that these suggestions play a relevant role in the article’s overall goal of proposing a reconceptualisation of the notion of fictional world.

2. Methodology and Case Studies

The methodology employed in this article draws from different disciplinary fields. The definition of the mental act of mind wandering comes from neuropsychology. Mind wandering is acknowledged to be a cognitive process extremely difficult to pin down, and it has been recently recognised that mind wandering can be looked at as a multidimensional heterogenous construct (Seli et al. 2018). In the recent work Creativity and the Wandering Mind: Spontaneous and Controlled Cognition, in their chapter on mind wandering and imagination, Mario Villena-González and Diego Cosmelli further point out the difficulties of pinpointing mind wandering: “given the subjective and introspective nature of this phenomenon, there are several methodological challenges that make it difficult to investigate” (Villena-González and Cosmelli 2020, p. 93). Mind wandering is a form of spontaneous thought, i.e., “thought that arises relatively free due to an absence of strong constraints on its content or on transitions from one mental state to another” (Fox and Christoff 2018, p. 4). And yet, so many open questions remain in relation to how this pervasive mental act influences our lives and daily activities. In the field of narrative and literary studies, scholars have only recently started to emphasise the importance that researching mind wandering could have on the field. More specifically, in an introductory article in which they summarise potential ways to look at mind wandering and reading processes, Karin Kukkonen and Sybille Baumbach highlight that narratology can help suggest novel ways to conceptualise mind wandering, in particular regarding its positive implications on reception processes. They also stress that “this potential needs to be tapped by further research in the field, which integrates latest advancements in cognitive psychology, stylistics, and narratology to gain deeper insight into how we read and process literary texts” (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, p. 15).

This article intends to be a step in this direction, proposing a contribution to the complex endeavour of understanding and defining mind wandering. As part of an ongoing collaboration with a neuropsychologist I am currently designing several empirical studies to establish a fruitful dialogue with neuropsychology and to test some of the ideas presented in this paper.1 As a cognitive narratologist, I rely on the assumption that, starting from textual analysis, narrative theory can suggest potential questions on the working of the minds of the author, the readers, and the characters, that can constitute productive directions for empirical inquiries on how our mind works. Marie-Laure Ryan famously asked “can narratology contribute something in return to cognitive science? On a very basic level it does: experimental science needs hypotheses to test; where is it going to get these hypotheses, if not from the study of narrative, this is to say, from narratology?” (Ryan 2010, p. 487). “Getting its insights from the texts themselves” (Ryan 2010, p. 489) cognitive narratology can formulate a set of questions that may guide the design of empirical studies.

As recognised in The Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies (Kuiken and Jacobs 2021), empirically measuring and assessing aesthetic functions and their impacts is a challenging task, in which various methods (from self-reports to physiological measures such as eye tracking, to more complex forms of measurement such as fMRI) can be employed and also combined. Despite the absence of unitary and precise theoretical models, many suggestions are currently being developed for the empirical study of relevant concepts coming from narrative theory such as “the clarification of the basic processes of literary engagement” (Kuiken and Jacobs 2021, p. 4). While a detailed discussion of the empirical studies we are currently developing falls beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that one of the primary aims of this paper is to formulate questions that can inform the design of empirical methods for investigating the role of mind wandering in the reception of fiction. The above-mentioned concept of literary engagement is essential for this study, since it has been traditionally and repeatedly connected to a cognitive state of “increased attention” (Kuijpers et al. 2021, p. 280). One of the current studies I am preparing is focused precisely on investigating a positive correlation between mind wandering and literary engagement: hypothesising that the more we mind wander while cognitively interacting with a text the more we experience literary engagement. This hypothesis challenges the dichotomous distinction of mind wandering as a negative distracting activity vs. attention as a positive mental state required for engagement. This approach aligns with the research direction proposed by Kukkonen and Baumbach, who emphasise the need to reconsider the relationship between mind wandering and attention. As they argue: “closer attention to the dynamics of mind-wandering in literary reading […] has the potential to contribute to current attempts in psychology to diversify our understanding of mind-wandering” (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, p. 3). This rethinking aims to move beyond a rigid dichotomy and toward a more nuanced conceptualisation of the interaction between mind wandering and attention. In the present article, I argue that a re-elaboration of the notion of immersion can be a relevant step in this direction—water images and metaphors provide a helpful tool in this respect, as I will explain.

While Kukkonen and Baumbach’s theoretical discourse revolves mainly around literary texts in the more traditional sense of the word “literary”, in The Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies the editors specify that when talking about empirical methods to approach literary texts “literature is broadly defined as all cultural artefacts that embody literary devices (e.g., stylistic variations). Thus, the target domain includes not only novels, short stories, and poetry, but also theatre, film, television, and some digital media” (Kuiken and Jacobs 2021, p. 2). This is the kind of approach I am following here: I am aware that my case studies may appear very diverse, both in genre and in media. For instance, I mention a movie, and specific medium-affordances pertaining to films would be worth being analysed separately. How is mind wandering depicted and elicited visually? How does the combination of sounds and images impact the wandering of the mind in the recipients? Moreover, immersion in movies may work differently than immersion in a literary text—despite the fact that many discourses on immersion are also more broadly connected to fictional worlds, regardless of the medium (most notably, Ryan 2015; but see also the chapter on narrative absorption by Kuijpers et al. 2021 in the above-mentioned edited volume on empirical literary studies). Similarly, I touch upon extremely different literary genres, from modernism to contemporary fantasy. The point of the article is to consider different media and different genres to draw attention to the phenomenon of mind wandering, how it is represented in these case studies and how it can be elicited. I want to explore this in the framework of the notion of fictional world, which is a concept that encompasses multiple genres and media. I acknowledge that empirical studies would also need to examine different narrative strategies that are more dependent on medium and genre, but my purpose here is to emphasise how certain strategies—particularly water imagery and metaphors—are widespread across many genres and media. I choose a few representative examples, but further studies in this direction are certainly needed. As a starting point, the main questions this article aims to raise through these case studies are the following: Why is the experience of cognitively engaging with fiction so often represented and perceived as water-based? How can these same water-based images help us better conceptualise the notion of fictional world?

3. Immersion in a Fictional World

Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea is a highly imaginative, intricated novel, infused with metaphors and symbols (Morgenstern 2019).2 One of its most pervasive and complex metaphors is the one presented already in the title “the starless sea”. What is the starless sea? The question remains partially unanswered, and at the same time several potential explanations are provided. The starless sea is made of interlaced stories; it exists in an underground world made of books and stories, where time can be suspended, stretched, played with in unexpected ways. The starless sea is far, far below. It is difficult to reach it but, at some point in the novel, it becomes threatening and it starts rising, and rising, devouring everything (Morgenstern 2019, pp. 310–15). The starless sea lures readers and dreamers towards it, with the intoxicating power of a siren’s song. There are no stars because it is located below the surface, in faraway depths. The starless sea is not made of water; the starless sea is made of honey (Morgenstern 2019, p. 331): the denser and stickier substance stresses its absorbing quality, and the fact that once you are in, it can be extremely difficult to get out. Also, the sweetness and the pleasant sugariness of honey emphasise its attraction and its inebriating charm. And yet, despite the denser feature of honey, it is also a fluid substance, with waves and tides, and constant movement. I would argue3 that the starless sea represents the captivating power of fiction. In other words, the starless sea is a way to figuratively embody the cognitive phenomenon narratologists have called immersion (and the related concepts of absorption, captivation, transportation, engrossment).

Immersion is a mental act, an imaginative leap the reader makes in order to “enter” a fictional dimension. Thomas Pavel mentions the “magnetic attraction” fictional worlds exert; he writes that “just as in painting the vanishing point and the dynamics of light and color allure and direct my gaze, absorbing me, as it were, in the pictorial space, narratives and plays activate my mental ability to get involved in their fictional world, grasp its challenges and gauge the stakes of action” (Pavel 2010, p. 100). Pavel remarks on the “force with which the spatial and temporal perspectives attract us” (Pavel 2010, p. 104), causing us to be not just casual detached outside observers, but to feel like we are inside the fictional space. “We are or quickly become sensitive to the concrete concerns raised by this world, perhaps as sensitive as we are to those present in our own actual world” (Pavel 2010, p. 106): fictional worlds make us feel involved and engaged, like we are part of “another world”. As with many narratological concepts, “immersion” has been defined in different ways, and it has also been distinguished from other related concepts such as absorption (immersion can be seen as a type of absorption but specified in narrower terms—or, according to Victor Nell, immersion and absorption are “less intense” phenomena than others such as “entrancement”, Nell 1988). Certain recurrent traits however remain, such as the above-mentioned idea of “entering” another dimension (through a mental process of re-centring); or the links established between this re-centring process and mental simulation (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002); or, the essential presence of textual and representational techniques that can better induce this cognitive phenomenon. Another notion that has been related to immersion and absorption is the one of illusion: how much make-believe is necessary to immerse ourselves in fiction and how this imaginative process exactly works is something that has been studied since Plato and is still an open topic of research interest (see Schaeffer 2005).4

Something that makes it possible to conceptualise the phenomenon of immersion in fiction is an essential metaphor that has been used by narratologists for decades now: what Ryan describes as the metaphor of fictional text as a world. Ryan highlights that “for immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world” (Ryan 2015, p. 62). The expanse of the text may not be an actual ocean, but conceptualising our mental relationship with a fictional text as immersion implies a series of related aquatic metaphors: we immerse ourselves in fiction, we plunge into the depths of the imagined world, we dive into the fictional dimension. A passage from The Starless Sea serves again as a pertinent example: as the main character slowly descends towards the sea, he feels “his head more drowning than swimming” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 328). The immersion process can, at times, reach a point where fact and fiction become blurred and indistinguishable—a state that could be described as a kind of “mental drowning”.

In this respect, Nell talks about “trance”, as an intense case of immersion and absorption: trance is a cognitive state that can lead to a momentarily (or, in even more extreme cases, more than momentarily) loss of the awareness of clear and distinct boundaries between “real” and fictional worlds. He points out that “attention holds me but trance fills me to varying degrees, with the wonder and flavor of alternative worlds” (Nell 1988, p. 77). Although Nell’s concept of trance may now be considered outdated, and numerous alternative definitions of deep immersion and absorption have since been proposed—such as transportation (Gerrig 1993; Green and Brock 2000) or story world absorption (Kuijpers et al. 2014)—I would like to return to Nell’s framework to highlight two enduring aspects that continue to this day to remain attached to the understanding of immersion in the field of narratology. In this context, considering Nell’s definition, the first crucial point to address is the emphasis on attention. The other is the connection Nell makes between this deep immersive state and fantasy and wonder. The cognitive experience of immersion is traditionally associated with the idea of sustained and deeply focused attention: “attentional focus is at the core of an absorption experience” (Kuijpers et al. 2021, p. 289). For instance, N. Katherine Hayles claims that during the reading process we concentrate on one single object for a prolonged period of time, ignoring external stimuli, “preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (Hayles 2007, p. 187). Somehow similarly, Maryanne Wolf distinguishes between the deep reading characterising our experience with books, and the digital reading that involves “skimming”, short attention span, and a faster and light reading mode, which also impacts the possibility of deeper comprehension. On the contrary, deep reading entails “slower cognitive processes” (Wolf 2018, p. 15). According to these assumptions, immersion and attention appear to be two very strongly interrelated mental phenomena, the former being made possible by the presence of the latter. Immersing ourselves in the depths of fictional worlds requires a cognitive mode of focused attention. Or so it seems.

I have mentioned that, when talking about absorption and trance, Nell also brings up fantasy, wonder, and the imagination. He explicitly links the trance provoked by the reading experience to other mental experiences such as “dreaming” or “being lost in one waking’s thoughts” (Nell 1988, p. 199). He claims that in order to understand the trance certain novels can induce in us a “phenomenology of fantasy” (Nell 1988, p. 199) is needed. Once again, Nell’s terms have been in the meantime reconceptualised and reformulated, but the idea that an active and exploratory imagination is involved in the experience of being absorbed into a fictional dimension persists (see Ryan 2015; Troscianko 2014; Quinlan and Mar 2020). I would like to introduce here the cognitive act of mind wandering and connect it to imaginative processes of reception, and to argue against the sharp distinction between mind wandering and attention. My goal is to emphasise the link between mind wandering and fantasy and the imagination to demonstrate mind wandering’s essential role in reception processes, and to highlight its importance. Mind wandering often equates with distraction, and it may thus appear as the opposite kind of mental state immersion requires (on mind wandering and its negative effects on attention and reading comprehension see for instance McVay and Kane 2012b; or Schooler et al. 2004). Monika M. Kuijpers et al. assert “imperviousness to distraction’ is unsurprisingly a central behavioral correlate of absorption” (Kuijpers et al. 2021, p. 289). But is this actually the case? Can mind wandering also be linked with fantasy and with imaginative mental acts? And what exactly is the relationship between mind wandering and our mental interaction with fictional worlds? A valuable starting point to answer these questions is Nell’s observation that a deep state of immersion—what he refers to as “trance”—is an intense form of sustained attention, but is also comparable to “dreaming” or “being lost in one’s waking thoughts: in fact, dreaming share strong similarities with other spontaneous forms of thinking, such as mind wandering (see Fox and Christoff 2018); moreover, “being lost in one’s waking thoughts” is one of the idiomatic expressions employed to define mind wandering itself.

4. Drifting and Mind Wandering

Mind wandering is a complex mental phenomenon. Kieran C.R. Fox and Kalina Christoff emphasise that “perhaps no other mental experience is so familiar to us in daily life, and yet so difficult to understand and explain scientifically” (Fox and Christoff 2018, p. 4). Mind wandering occupies approximately 50% of our waking time. Different languages employ various and curious metaphorical expressions to define it: “thinking about the immortality of the crab”; “looking-far away”; “dreaming about blue almonds”, “throwing balloons”, “thinking about the death of the calf”; “counting crows”—5 these are just some of many idiomatic expressions from different languages used to describe the mental phenomenon of mind wandering that seem to emphasise the connection between mind wandering and imaginative acts. Traditionally, research in neuropsychology and cognitive science has underscored the negative implications of mind wandering, showing that it can disrupt short-term memory, reading comprehension, and working memory (see McVay and Kane 2012a; Liu et al. 2023; Mrazek et al. 2013). Therefore, if sustained attention has been connected by narratologists and literary scholars to the immersion process, mind wandering has been scientifically labelled as a distractive act, and thus something that may negatively impact our reading experience. Sarah Bro Trasmundi and Juan Toro state that it was traditionally “widely accepted that mind wandering is detrimental for reading flow, comprehension and the capacity to make inferences based on the text” (Trasmundi and Toro 2023, p. 1).

However, more recent studies have started to shift the way in which mind wandering is understood, revealing how much more complex and difficult to understand this cognitive state is, and beginning to highlight its potential positive effects. In fact, the act of mind wandering seems to be capable of generating new ideas and serendipity, leading to unexpected connections, and fostering problem-solving skills (see, for example, Fox and Christoff 2018). Therefore, mind wandering has commenced to be coupled with specific benefits, such as nurturing creative and imaginative flows of associations, calling for a more nuanced interpretation of this mental experience. Very recent studies on the topic are hypothesising that mind wandering can even potentially enhance specific cognitive abilities such as predictive processing (Vékony et al. 2025; Simor et al. 2024). For the purpose of the discourse I want to conduct on the reception of fictional worlds, it is crucial to remember that mind wandering, in its multi-faceted, subjective complexity, can be either a spontaneous phenomenon, or a partially controlled one. More specifically, scientists distinguish between intentional and unintentional mind wandering (see Seli et al. 2015; Barr et al. 2020): it is the intentional type of mind wandering that interests me more here, which is the kind of mind wandering more strongly associated with creativity (Agnoli et al. 2018; Barnett and Kaufman 2020). In this sense, mind wandering can be somehow induced and guided, and a partial cognitive control (or meta-cognitive engagement) can be operating in conjunction with it (Seli et al. 2015; Barr et al. 2020)6 Hence, when I am discussing mind wandering as prompted by a text, I am referring to a type of guided mind wandering, a flow of thoughts inspired and evoked by the text. In particular: “text-specific thoughts”, that are related to the text itself, and “text-inspired thoughts”, that stray a bit further away from the text itself but are still relatable to it (Ternes and Kleinau 2022, p. 62).

If the study of mind wandering has rapidly expanded and gone from being a niche topic to becoming a major area of investigation among neuropsychologists and cognitive scientists, in the field of literary and narrative studies, mind wandering is still a niche topic. The main major contribution to the study of the relationship between mind wandering and reading fiction is a special issue of Diegesis, dated 2022, edited by Karin Kukkonen and Sybil Baumbach, titled “Narratives between Attention and Mind Wandering”. Here, it is claimed that, while reading: “mind-wandering is an essential component of attention, as it prevents cognitive overload, fuels our imagination, and facilitates creative thinking by enabling a temporary drifting away from the immediate object of attention” (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, p. 2). This is also in line with what Alice Bennett previously argued, when she proposed to conceptualise a book as “a constantly interrupted object, and one which acknowledged and accommodated—and even encouraged—these interruptions” (Bennett 2018, p. 13)—although without explicitly linking these moments of distraction with mind wandering. Following Kukkonen and Baumbach’s line of research, I want to further contend that mind wandering is part of the immersion process and it does not constitute a hindrance to it. I would like to undermine the assumption that immersion equates with focused attention, and to call for a more nuanced and multifarious understanding of immersion. In this direction, more empirical studies are needed: for instance, experiments meant to show how engagement with a book is not hindered but instead enhanced by mind wandering episodes. In this sense, there have already been some attempts: while the majority of studies on absorption and reading, as said, have concentrated on stressing that immersion and absorption are distraction-free activities (see the overview made by Kuijpers et al. 2021), some scholars have ventured to suggest that “absorbed reading of fiction and mind-wandering are very similar experiences” (Kuijpers et al. 2021, p. 290). Arthur M. Jacobs and Roel M. Willems emphasise that the psychological constructs of immersion and absorption in relation to fiction are “multi-facetted, conceptually far from being unified, and difficult to measure empirically—be it with behavioral or neurocognitive methods” (2019, p. 7). Jacobs and Willems (2019, p. 7) also hint at the possibility that the meaning-making characterising reading engagement involves both focused cognition and mind wandering: I would suggest these two cognitive processes work in tandem and they are both integral parts of the complex cognitive and emotional state of immersion. As a consequence, I also propose a more dynamic conceptualisation of the notion of fictional worlds. In relation to this theoretical process of re-conceptualisation, water metaphors and images prove to be effective tools again.

Mind wandering can be thought of as drifting away from what we are doing, but where are we drifting exactly? And how? I believe that the kind of mind wandering that is more interesting to analyse in relation to the experience of mentally encountering a fictional dimension is the intentional, guided type. Jacobs and Willems corroborate this intuition, when they write that “it is the narrative which imposes a discourse model upon us, whereas during mind wandering (…) the situation model is generated ‘from within’, based on our memories and experiences. How much these processes overlap and relate to the notions of intentional and unintentional mind-wandering (Seli et al. 2018) is an intriguing issue for future research” (2019, p. 7).

Mind wandering is part of our relationship with fictional worlds in two different ways, and this is in line with two of the main approaches a cognitive perspective to literature and narrative entails. When considering a text through the kind of “mind-aware gaze” cognitive narratology implies, we can theoretically look at what happens in the mind of the characters, in the mind of the author, and in the mind of the readers (I have previously called a text a cognitive playground where different minds meet and interact, Arnavas 2021, p. 18). Leaving here aside studies on creative cognition focused on the author’s mind, it can be stated that mind wandering can be either represented in a fictional text, by describing the experience of the characters’ minds, and elicited in readers through the use of specific images and textual strategies. These two ways in which mind wandering is present in our relationship with fiction, by representation and evocation, can, of course, be interlaced.

When mind wandering is evoked it is not thus a random event—mind wandering while dealing with a fictional world can be induced by the presence of certain descriptions, the use of a certain rhythm, and the presence of a number of narrative and textual techniques. Trying to pinpoint narrative ways in which mind wandering is triggered, and its consequences on the reading experience, would also help neuropsychology research on the subject, since: “mind wandering researchers are concerned with unravelling the way that streams of thought become activated, both intentionally and unintentionally, the conditions that prompt such shifts in processing, and the consequences these changes cause” (Barr et al. 2020, p. 42). Kukkonen and Baumbach individuate a series of what they call “distractors”, i.e., narrative strategies that can induce mind wandering in readers. These are: repetitions, long stretches of text, embedded information, complexity, stream of consciousness, turn-taking, surprise effects (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, pp. 12–14). What is particularly revealing and interesting about Kukkonen and Baumbach’s list is the fact that many of these strategies are “Protean attractor/distractor devices” (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, p. 14), meaning that they can function as both catalysts of attention and as mind-wandering inspiring tools, according to the context in which they are employed. Similarly, water-related metaphors and images in fiction have been traditionally used to show the immersive power of fiction in a more attention-oriented sense;7 and yet, this article argues, water-related metaphors and images to be found in fictional worlds function also as mind wandering-related devices, in this way providing a vaster and more multi-faceted account of the mental engagement with fictional worlds. This is true especially considering recent findings in neuropsychology that, as mentioned, demonstrate how mind wandering (especially the partially controlled type) exhibits a strong correlation with creativity and imaginative skills. It makes thus an even stronger sense to acknowledge the phenomenon of mind wandering as an integral and essential component of the reading experience (and of the fruition of fictional worlds in a vaster sense).

Engaging with fiction possesses recognised positive benefits on our cognitive makeup, for instance by stimulating our Theory of Mind skills (Zunshine 2006; Palmer 2004), by improving problem solving abilities (Herman 2004), or by fostering empathy (Keen 2007). Terence Cave provides a brilliant account of the specific affordances of literary thinking (Cave 2016), showing both the continuities and the discrepancies between everyday thinking and literary thinking. In particular, he focuses on the crucial role literary thinking has on the “evolution of imaginative affordances” (Cave 2016, p. 143) in human cognitive abilities. Equally, mind wandering has been shown to be very strongly linked to the imagination, to the point that some scholars even argue that “mind wandering might be in great part an imaginative process itself” (Villena-González and Cosmelli 2020, p. 112), and this, they say, is “even clearer in the particular case of deliberate mind wandering” (Villena-González and Cosmelli 2020, p. 112). Therefore, both fiction and mind wandering have documented strong relationships with imaginative processes—it is not thus so unexpected that they can be themselves related, and that the particular type of mind wandering represented and evoked by fiction is of the more imaginative type. I would like now to talk more specifically of how water metaphors and images can help show this interrelation of mind wandering–fiction–imagination.

5. Oceans, Ponds, Waves, Rivers: Fictional Streams?

As recognised already by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their seminal work Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), metaphorical thinking is pervasive and characterises the way in which we interpret and conceptualise the world. In this sense, the expression “conceptual metaphor” started to be employed to indicate those metaphors deeply ingrained in our conceptual system that implicitly guide our comprehension of reality.8 Multiple subsequent studies of metaphors in everyday life and in the literary/poetic contexts have been made, by Lakoff and Johnson themselves and by many other scholars: an essential element that has been expanded and that interests me here is the embodied dimension of these metaphors (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999; and Johnson 1987, 2017). Metaphorical thinking has been shown to have bodily origins, thus stressing the fact that conceptual metaphors always involve our sensory-motor experience. I come back here to this idea in my discussion of water metaphors and images. As Ryan emphasises (Ryan 2015, p. 62) narrative theory has traditionally utilised the water-based metaphor of immersion to indicate our cognitive involvement with a fictional world. However, the metaphor of immersion is not only limited to narratology. The notion of being deeply involved with something, be it an activity, a piece of media, or a specific situation, has been metaphorically described as a state of being immersed into that something long before immersion became a narratological concept. I would like to argue that ENGAGEMENT IS IMMERSION works as a conceptual metaphor rooted in the bodily experience of being submerged in water, something that strongly evokes the idea of being surrounded and enclosed into something without the possibility of easily getting out of it. The term “immersion” comes from the Latin immergere, which was already used both to indicate plunging into a watery substance and as a metaphor to signify absorption, for example, in the study of something (as in this expression by Valerius Maximus (1888) “Pythagorae praeceptis Metaponti penitus immergit”—he immerses himself in the study of Pythagoras in Metaponto).

In this respect, Albrecht Classen emphasises that since antiquity human conceptualisations of space have developed with water as an essential constitutive element: the space of water has been “influential” for the “development of human culture” (Classen 2018, p. xvi). Bodies of water have always provided humans with “crucial criteria” for “epistemological perception and understanding” (Classen 2018, p. xvii). More specifically, in his discussion of literary texts across ages and cultures, Classen makes insightful observations on the fact that since the Middle Ages (if not earlier) literature has expressed reflections on human culture through water as symbol and metaphor. Furthermore, as anticipated, the notion of immersion into a fictional world can also be linked to ideas of blurring boundaries, merging different planes of reality, experiencing novel dimensions. Classen notes that already in pre-modern literature, the discourse on human boundaries, “the exploration of new territories, and the discoveries of unknown dimension is commonly associated with water” (Classen 2018, p. 217). Building on this recognition of water’s symbolic relevance, with my study I argue that it is not a stretch to suggest that many languages and cultures seem to associate the phenomenon of mental engagement with water through a shared conceptual metaphor.

If water serves as a foundational metaphor for absorption, it is also widely recognised as a conceptual framework for understanding the workings of the mind more broadly. As Nicholas Royle observes, “waterwords” and aquatic metaphors have long been used to describe the flow of thought, dating back to the early days of Western psychology. Daniel Oliver referred to the “mingled and moving stream of consciousness”, and the expression became later even more widespread with the work of William James (Royle 2024, p. 1). Therefore, conceptualising thought processes through water-based metaphors is deeply embedded in how we understand the workings of the mind. On the one hand, the conceptual metaphor ENGAGEMENT IS IMMERSION guides our understanding of cognitive interaction with fiction. On the other hand, the conceptual metaphor of the mind as a flowing stream of water—CONSCIOUSNESS IS A STREAM—remains a powerful and intuitively recognised model. By bringing these two metaphors together, I contend that the traditional narratological notion of immersion overlooks a crucial aspect: the fluid, ever-shifting nature of water, which the stream of consciousness metaphor vividly captures. When we metaphorically picture ourselves as being immersed into something, this comes from the physical sensation of being immersed into water: a liquid, unstable, ever-changing medium. This suggests that immersion implies not a static state of concentrated and fixed attention, but rather a dynamic interplay between focus and mental wandering. In this sense, to be immersed in fiction is to be immersed in a fictional stream: a constantly flowing, evolving current of wandering thoughts.

In the present research it is even more interesting for my claims to go back to different verbal expressions that are employed to talk about mind wandering. I already listed some idiomatic expressions different languages use to capture the meaning of mind wandering. What can be especially interesting for the purpose of this article is the fact that mind wandering is also idiomatically referred to with water-related verbs and images. Some examples: in Japanese, the expression 思考の流れ (shikō no nagare) refers to a flow of thoughts (similar to the idea of stream); in French laisser son esprit voguer means to let one’s mind sail/float—voguer relates to travelling by water; in Chinese, 思绪如潮 (sīxù rú cháo) refers to thoughts flowing like ocean’s tides. The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi concludes his poem “L’infinito” with the famous lines “così tra questa/Immensità s’annega il pensier mio:/E naufragar m’é dolce in questo mare” (translation: And into this Immensity my thought sinks ever drowning,/And it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea9). Leopardi’s ([1819] 1966) lines emphasise that the unique state of mind required to gain exceptional and profound poetical insights is an indefinite and uncapturable cognitive condition in which the mind is almost lost in wandering. As it becomes apparent with these examples, in idiomatic and metaphorical expressions mind wandering is both associated with sinking and immersing oneself into profound far-away aquatic depths and with wave-like incessant movement, in uncertain spaces where boundaries between reality and fantasy are blurred. Mind wandering and immersive states appear thus very close to each other: it would seem that attention is not the only cognitive component of the phenomenon of immersion. Mind wandering is an integral part of it, not an opposite mental act constituting a hindrance.

Water images and metaphors to be found in different fictional examples help to highlight how mind wandering constitutes a relevant cognitive moment in our mental interaction with fictional worlds—one that can enhance the positive effects of fiction on our imaginative makeup. The examples I am discussing play with the above-described water-based repertoire to convey ideas about the experience of mentally dealing with fiction. I would add the employment of water metaphors and images to Kukkonen and Baumbach’s list of mind wandering-related narrative strategies. As previously noted, I align with Kukkonen and Baumbach’s view that mind-wandering can both be depicted and elicited through specific narrative strategies. These strategies may function at the level of the characters’ minds, the readers’ minds, or both. Some techniques only represent mind-wandering, others primarily provoke it, while certain strategies are capable of doing both simultaneously. According to Kukkonen and Baumbach (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022), the stream of consciousness is one of these dual-function strategies: by portraying a character’s drifting thoughts, it may likewise prompt a similar wandering in the reader’s own mind. I further propose that this effect is not incidental but closely tied to the metaphorical grounding of stream of consciousness in water imagery. Water-based metaphors, as we shall see, are frequently employed—often metafictionally—to explore fiction, cognition, imagination, and the phenomenon of mind-wandering itself; such imagery can also serve to guide the readers’ minds into a state of deliberate, structured cognitive wandering. The fact that many of my examples use water imagery in a metafictional sense, to suggest reflections on what it means to interact with a fictional dimension, is another case in point. It seems that metafictional strategies can in themselves be elicitors of deliberate mind wandering: in the already mentioned issue of Diegesis dedicated to mind wandering and literature, Amandus Hopfgarten and Theresa Krampe contend precisely this, by asserting that “metafictional elements (…) initiate and guide episodes of productive mind-wandering. Mind-wandering readers of metafiction can furthermore be expected to remain conscious of and retain some measure of control over their reflections because of their increased meta-awareness” (Hopfgarten and Krampe 2022, p. 40).

In Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, there is a mysterious pond that children may find wandering, without following fixed paths. This pond may also turn into an ocean, taking people far away, both in a geographical and a temporal sense. The whole novel is punctuated by water images, it may be said that the novel proceeds wave by wave, water bringing change and providing what is needed for unexpected turns of events. In the pond/ocean there is memory, but there is also forgetfulness. The main character finds, once in it, that in the water he can momentarily grasp the meaning of the whole universe:

the currents of the ocean pulled at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of the time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered.

(Gaiman 2013, p. 262)

But the ocean is not still—the main character (whose name we never know) cannot stay still in it forever. The ocean moves, and it stretches, and it shrinks, it can suddenly fit into a bucket, and then it extends again and brings people towards another dimension, otherwise unreachable. But it never stays motionless.

The ocean in Gaiman’s novel functions as both a powerful metaphor of the reading experience and it can also be a means to encourage cognitive wandering. In a similar way as it happens in Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea (Morgenstern 2019), the ocean contained in a pond is here an avenue to explore new worlds and new conceptions of reality, transporting one towards other dimensions. It is connected with memory, with fantasy, and with possibility. The starless sea and the ocean in a pond can both be read as symbols of the immersive power of fiction. In my analysis, as anticipated, I am considering both narrative devices that describe mind wandering (thus, at the level of the fictional mind) and narrative devices that can induce mind wandering (the level of the reading mind)—the two may overlap. The extent to which they overlap and the fact that these devices actually inspire a deliberate type of mind wandering need to be empirically demonstrated. I am formulating hypotheses that lead to empirical tests.10

Through the repetitive use of verbs and aquatic images evoking swimming, plunging, diving, immersing, drowning, ebbing and flowing, dipping, and so on, The Starless Sea and The Ocean at the End of the Lane may induce embodied mental responses in readers—I would claim that these embodied responses imply a mental state of fluidity and wandering. Reading of physical scenarios described also through verbs connected to physical acts may lead to “corporeal imagining” (Trasmundi and Toro 2023, p. 5), and if these images and verbs pertain to fluid, aquatic, and shifting representations, it may be likely that similar kind of mental acts are stimulated. This is especially true considering what was said before, i.e., that these water metaphors and images are based on deeply ingrained conceptual metaphors that make us instinctively associate descriptions of engagement with fiction and descriptions of wandering thoughts as being connected to the physical sensation of being in moving water. Moreover, the study of mind wandering itself would benefit from considering more of its embodied aspects, and how this mental act can be influenced by corporeal imaging, as Trasmundi and Toro emphasise: “an overall brain-body-environment system” must be considered when studying mind wandering and its connection with imaginative processes (Trasmundi and Toro 2023, p. 12). What is crucial then here is that these aquatic images employed to describe the cognitive fruition of fiction entail constant movement, dynamicity, lack of fixity and staticity. One of the main issues with the current definition of fictional world is precisely that it is conceptualised as an extremely fixed entity: we construct a detailed world using textual clues, and then we can enter it, and we can exit it. Richard Walsh stresses that fictional worlds theory puts emphasis on the world of the text as an objective referent, implying that this world is more or less fully extrapolated through textual indications: it exists as a kind of fully formed entity (Walsh 2017, p. 371). The fictional world may thus seem a sort of hypostatised object. A fixed object is easily connected to a fixed state of mind: a focused, unchanging attentive mode. I pointed out that the sea and the ocean in Morgenstern and Gaiman’s novels can be interpreted as symbolically epitomising the immersive quality of fiction. And yet, what these aquatic metaphors reveal is also the dynamic, fluid quality of this immersive process. “Change is what a story is, after all” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 153) asserts Mirabel (a character, but also a symbol for Fate, in The Starless Sea): and the starless sea itself, and all the repeated water images and metaphors used in the text, keep asserting over and over the dynamic nature of narratives, through their uncapturable and incessant aquatic movement. There are moments in which the water movement is even embodied in the characters themselves and in the environment around them, as in this description of Mirabel’s gown (Mirabel is also the master of stories, or the “story sculptor”): “as her gown cascades around the chair, the ripples in the fabric become waves, and within the waves there are ships and sailors and sea monsters, and then the sea within her gown is lost in the drifting snow” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 418).11

Nicholas Royle explores what he calls “waterwords”, or “hydrological metaphors” in relation to Virginia Woolf and the stream of consciousness. He reflects upon the fact that the stream of consciousness as a literary notion involves an overflowing of points of view and of cognitive movements. He writes:

it is the lucid and precise madness of the flows and stops, undecidably inside or outside, inside and outside, surprising, yes, the drip, drip, the eddies and ripples, the secret cellars and unknown gardens, flowing and undertowing, waving and drowning, disowned or disowning, tapping and overlapping, veering and careering, dreaming and streaming.

(Royle 2024, p. 19)

As anticipated, Woolf’s stream of consciousness is perhaps the best example to talk about mind wandering as represented and evoked in a fictional context; perhaps an even too obvious example. Nevertheless the concept of a stream of consciousness not only provides the idea of dynamicity, but it does so with a water-based image. As already said, in their list of “distractors”, i.e., narrative strategies that elicit mind wandering, Kukkonen and Baumbach insert stream of consciousness (Kukkonen and Baumbach 2022, p. 12). They tie it more to the phenomenon of prolonged focalisation, but it is also quite apparent that stream of consciousness in literature can be a form of narrative representation of the wandering of the mind—a way to capture the complexity of the different directions that a mind at work can simultaneously take.

In Woolf’s The Waves (Woolf 2015), notoriously her most enigmatic work, the extent to which the complexity of the stream of consciousness (more: of different interlaced streams of consciousness) is coupled with water imagery reaches a peak. Even though, the whole of Woolf’s literary production is characterised by being “wonderfully fertile from a hydrological perspective (…). Everything is flowing, waving, surging, rippling, dissolving, awash” (Royle 2024, p. 19). In The Waves, the ceaseless motion of the sea permeates the narrative on multiple levels, extending beyond the use of the stream of consciousness technique. It is explicitly evoked in the interludes, functions as the central symbolic motif of the novel—representing time and each character’s relationship to it—and is stylistically embedded in the text’s distinctive, musical rhythm (see Clements 2005). The sea also reflects specific events and character traits, while metaphorically linking the mental currents of the various consciousnesses portrayed in the novel, just as individual waves form part of a single ocean. In this sense, as Royle observes, Woolf’s stream of consciousness exhibits a kind of telepathic fluidity that transcends individual subjectivity. It merges multiple minds within the narrative and extends outward, reaching into the consciousness of the reader (Woolf 2015, p. 20). What several critics have remarked is the fact that points of view in The Waves keep shifting, in a constant flow that is difficult to entirely capture. It is more of a flow that the reader has to abandon to, drifting away with it. Following its wandering meanderings. In The Waves, within the fictional world of the text “several fictive worlds proliferate and interpenetrate in ways that are neither conventional nor clearly defined” (Richardson 1973, p. 692).12

In one of her essays, Woolf herself underlines that in The Waves she has tried “setting each paragraph flowing and following like the waves of the sea” (Woolf 2009, p. 61). With the paragraphs, also the chapters, and the depictions of the characters’ mental wanderings flow together in a sea-like motion. As Woolf emphasises multiple times in her own diaries, the book is written “to a rhythm not to a plot” (Woolf 1977–1984, iii. 316). The variable and unpredictable rhythm of the mind, mimicked by the rhythm of the waters, sways the readers’ minds as well: “I am like the foam that races over the beach” (Woolf 2015, p. 76) Rhoda declares, and this unstable and dynamic mental condition characterises the whole cognitive experience of reading The Waves. Susan asserts: “it is the furious coal-black stream that makes us dizzy if we look down into it (…) but if we look down we turn giddy” (Woolf 2015, p. 80). This mental giddiness is the signature mental state represented and inspired by Woolf’s masterpiece, a cognitive status that has both unnerved and lured readers and critics. The characters’ and ours wandering thoughts are “the roaring waters” (The Waves p. 80), the “whirling abysses” (Woolf 2015, p. 135), the “thousand glassy hollows of mid-ocean” (Woolf 2015, p. 141), the “rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sight (…)—that rise and sink” (Woolf 2015, p. 153).

Water images and metaphors, the hydrological words, can help us re-conceptualise the notion of fictional world in a more dynamic and cognitively oriented way, one that encompasses both attentive states and the unavoidable constant wandering of the mind. I would suggest that fictional streams could function as a potential alternative definition, one that deliberately links the reception process to the stream of consciousness and to the wandering of the mind. The cognitive act of immersing oneself figuratively into a fictional stream would then imply not only the plunging into the depths of an alternative reality, but also the constant swimming from one location to another. The imaginative affordances of fiction would not be impaired by mind wandering but instead enhanced: as Transmundi and Toro stress “mind wandering can be seen as a condition for a special form of imaginative reading” (Trasmundi and Toro 2023, p. 2). These water metaphors found in different fictional examples can work as symbolic tools to better grasp our dynamic cognitive engagement with fiction, oscillating like waves between attentive states and the wanderings of the mind.

A further beneficial and interesting remark can be made about Woolf’s The Waves: as it is known, Woolf’s first title for the novel was The Moths. What is less known is that, in a 1919 essay titled “Reading”, Woolf minutely describes the cognitive experience of reading, including the wandering of the mind. While doing so, she employs the figure of the moth as a metaphorical clue.13In this context, the figure of the moth emerges as a key metaphor employed by Woolf in an essay where she articulates the idea that mind-wandering is an essential component of the reading experience. The fact that The Waves—a novel I would consider central to both the representation and evocation of mind-wandering—was originally intended to be titled The Moths further reinforces this interpretation.

Despite being replaced by the waves as the main leading metaphorical framework of the novel, moths still act as meaningful metaphors, appearing rather frequently in The Waves. The aquatic metaphor gives more fluidity and dynamicity to the portrayal of consciousness emerging from Woolf’s text, but the moths still stress the ephemeral and incessant shifting between different tensions, such as individual identity and collective thinking, stylistic constraints and creative freedom, and, I would add, focused attention and mind wandering. As Marylin Charles emphasises, “The Waves may be viewed as an attempt to descend into and explore the unconscious and to bring forth its riches into the light through the use of metaphor” (Charles 2004, p. 71).14 Rhoda is the character who perhaps embodies more clearly the hydrological metaphor as related to the wandering mind, being “the nymph of the fountain always wet, obsessed with visions, dreaming” (Woolf 2015, p. 164), and also the moth-metaphor as the quivering and flickering of the mind between different ephemeral states: “her shoulderblades meet across her back like the wings of a small butter-fly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles” (Woolf 2015, p. 11). This is a moment in which Rhoda, as a child, cannot find meaning in drawn figures (perhaps letters?) on the blackboard, her mind refusing to be constrained in one single space, always moving and wandering in alternative directions.

6. “A Sea-Change”: Watery Creative Revelations

Water imagery seems to be particularly significant for the depiction of the interlacement between mind wandering and processes of creativity connected to fiction. As stated, the kind of mind wandering I am interested in is the deliberate type, a thought process partially controlled and involving meta-awareness. Villena-González and Cosmelli lay emphasis on the fact that mind wandering and the imagination “can be classified as self-generated mental activity and (…) numerous commonalities can be found between them: the way they are constructed, how they influence cognitive processes, and the underlying neural mechanisms” (Villena-González and Cosmelli 2020, p. 94). The conclusion Villena-González and Cosmelli draw is that, despite still involving less executive control, deliberate mind wandering may foster creative associations in the same way imaginative processes do. Additionally, Trasmundi and Toro write that “dreaming, mind wandering, creative thinking, and goal directed thought (…) constitute a spectrum in which borders are fuzzy, and deliberate constraints vary continuously from weak to strong, depending on the dynamics of the activity taking place” (Trasmundi and Toro 2023, p. 5). The metaphor of fictional streams I have here introduced can be effective to capture the idea of the reception processes of fiction as a dynamic alternation of cognitive states, fluctuating from attention and mind wandering: the immersion process could be re-interpreted as involving the constant movement of the consciousness’s waves. This dynamic interlacing of cognitive states is, as Woolf would say, “rather of a creative character” (Woolf 1966–1967, p. 25): the mental fluctuation prompted by mind wandering gives rise to the creation of more novel scenarios. These novel scenarios do not represent fixed and static interpretations, but rather they are fluid and flexible intuitions. I would like to focus even more precisely on how this creative component of mind wandering is powerfully embodied in certain fictional passages involving water.

At the end of The Waves, Bernard, the failed writer, exclaims:

how tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement (…) lying on a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining (…) what delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement (…). Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.

(Woolf 2015, p. 143)

After this reflection, Bernard goes back to describe the old nursery of the past days, facing the sea, when the six characters’ minds and bodies were even more interconnected, in a kind of telepathic continuum. Bernard’s final monologue has divided critics, and it is, needless to say, enigmatic and subject to different interpretations: is Bernard having a final comprehension of the mysteries of life and death and of the six characters’ interlaced lives? Is this a sort of mystic revelation? Is he deluded? Is this meaningful moment purposedly depicted as ephemeral and not possible to be pinned down clearly? Leaving aside all the multiple proposed readings of the monologue, I would like to draw a comparison with the moment of all-encompassing understanding happening to the narrating character in Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I have previously quoted. Both characters (and it is important to say that they are both artists) experience a sort of creative epiphany in connection to the movement of water, and both characters realise they cannot keep their realisation as a still and fixed thought, reaching the conclusion that they have to embrace constant change, fluctuating states, and the uncapturable nature of human cognition. The meta-reflection on the imagination the characters experience reveals the shifting and moving essence of imaginative processes.

At the end of The Ocean at the End of the Lane there is another significant episode: the mysterious non-ageing girl Lettie seems to be taken away dead by the waves of the ocean/pond. She looks like she is still and dead, but in reality she is not; she has just suffered “a sea-change”:

she’s been given to her ocean (…). I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they move (…). I said ‘will she be the same?’ The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. ‘Nothing’s ever the same’, she said. ‘Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans’.

(Gaiman 2013, p. 297)

The sea-change is once again employed as a metaphor15 to represent a creative, ever-changing act, one involving extraordinary intuitions but also the embracement and acceptance of impermanence and elusiveness.

As an apt recapitulation of the examples and topics just covered, I would like to open a parenthesis on Ayumu Watanabe’s animated movie Children of the Sea (海獣の子供) (Watanabe 2019), a visionary work that somehow summarises the points I have made about mind wandering, hydrological words and images, and creative intuitions. In a rather similar way as it happens with Woolf’s The Waves, the sea here acts as a shared medium where the children protagonists of the movie experience a collective psychic immersion. Children of the Sea proceeds in a fragmented fashion, with the episodes tied together by the overarching sea metaphor. Ruka, Umi, and Sora are mysterious beings, whose minds and bodies are both interconnected with each other and mirroring the enigmatic currents of the ocean. The discovery of constant interconnections between the microcosm and the macrocosm is a central theme of the movie: our cognition is said to reflect the structure and organisational dynamics of the sea and the stars. The human stream of consciousness, the movie seems to suggest, is inherently interwoven with the vast, ever-moving sea. The climax of the movie is reached when Ruka experiences a sort of mystical cosmic moment of harmonious merging with the sea (again re-calling the moments of revelation described in both The Waves and The Ocean at the End of the Lane): she is swallowed by a whale, she becomes the sea, her memories and thoughts wander in different directions simultaneously and she seems to be grasping the meaning of the universe. This is conveyed through powerful visual images, and the study of how these images may induce mind wandering in connection to their metaphorical meaning would be worth being separately explored. This meaning appears to centre on the recognition of an intrinsic interconnection between the mind and the ocean—both characterised by their ineffability and ceaseless dynamism. It is worth noting that the name Ruka can be roughly translated as “flow,” while Umi and Sora mean “sea” and “sky”, respectively. These associations resonate with Peter Boxall’s reflections (as cited in Royle 2024) on the kind of imagination fiction can evoke. He writes, in poetic terms, that fiction enables us to conceive of “unthought conjunctions between human memory and the blue sea, the blue sky, our planet of the sheerest, wildest blue” (Boxall 2020, pp. 352–53). Boxall’s formulation underscores how fictional realms—or fictional streams!—can stimulate expansive imaginative connections, particularly by linking the vast, blue domains of sea and sky with the workings of human imagination and creativity.

Watanabe’s dazzling, enigmatic, and highly imaginative movie represents in visual form some key themes connected to water, fiction, and the imagination. Metaphorical creative mental processes are explicitly suggested to follow a sea-like mysterious movement. The movie recalls the previous examples I mentioned in how, through extremely impactful visuals, it explicitly represents water as an organising principle mirroring the inner flow of consciousness. All the fictional cases I have employed involve a meta-reflection on the mental processing of fiction itself, some of them indicating the meta-fictional elements in more overt ways than others. As stated, metafictional devices seem to be in themselves means to evoke an imaginative and creative form of mind wandering (see Hopfgarten and Kampe). Thus, in The Starless Sea, my first example, towards the end the main character is rowing in a boat in another sea, no more the honey-made starless one, but a papery sea: “paper confetti in varying shades of blue and green and purple, with white along the edges for the surf. As it stretches farther out from the shore there are streamers mixed with it, long curls of paper pretending to be waves” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 445). Considering that many of the stories included in the novel are stories that we first read as kind of interludes, and then we find out that the character himself is reading the same stories in books he has found in the mysterious, underground sea-bound library, it seems here that Morgenstern is telling us that the book we are holding is in itself a papery sea. The boundaries between the fiction and the actual are purposedly made blurred, suggesting that the creative movement of the consciousness’s waves implies the fictional world as being always a fluid body. Zachary, the protagonist of The Starless Sea, is said to be having “some difficulty separating reality from fantasy” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 407). This cognitive feature of Zachary as a reader in the end is portrayed not as a difficulty, but as an inevitable part of the reception of fictional worlds. At the beginning of the article, I recalled what Nell defines as extreme cases of trance, where one forgets the boundaries between the real and the fictional: there are certainly situations pertaining to specific mental pathologies in which this could be dangerous. However, this may be a less radical distinction than it initially appears: immersion is not a static process in which reality and fiction—or mind-wandering and focused attention—exist as fixed, opposing poles with clearly defined and stable boundaries and relations between them. Rather, the fictional and the real are continuously interwoven, thanks to the mind’s tendency to wander and blend multiple layers of reality and multiple cognitive states.

In this sense, immersion does not determine a fixed re-centring into another dimension (which somehow gives the idea of a static separation between actual world and fictional one), something that we can conceptualise in terms of “accessibility relations” (Ryan 1991, pp. 31–47):16 the fictional and the actual are constantly intermingled thanks to the incessant wanderings of the mind. “I was in the story and then wandered outside of it (…) new stories wrap themselves around the old ones. The ancient stories that flames whisper to moths” (Morgenstern 2019, p. 373). The actual impossibility of being fixed in one place (inside or outside a story) is repeatedly portrayed in The Starless Sea: we are all waves and stories. We wander in fictional dimensions while we are doing something different, and we wander “outside” of it while we are confronting a fictional time space. The terms “in” and “out” are not particularly helpful here: the concept of fictional stream can perhaps capture more of what I mean to express.

Pavel himself writes that there are moments in which “the fictional realm ceases to be a narrow surrounding milieu in which we immerse so well, and becomes a vaster place (…) a pervading worldview” (Pavel 2010, p. 108). I intend to stress that these are not special moments characterising our relationship with a fictional world, but these interminglings and expansions from one direction to another are the signature traits of all our interactions with fiction. Relying on neuropsychology’s theories establishing links between mind wandering and creative processes can help convey how these movements are not disruptive moments but instead enriching ones, providing intuitions, novel associations, and imaginative possibilities.

7. Conclusions

In this article, I argue for a reconceptualisation of the notion of fictional world as a more fluid, stream-like mental construct, shaped by imaginative engagement and mind wandering. To carry on my argument, I make use of aquatic metaphors, starting with the notion of immersion. Immersion is to be found both in narrative theory and in embodied conceptual metaphors characterising our daily interaction with the world. I couple the metaphor ENGAGEMENT IS IMMERSION with the metaphor CONSCIOUSNESS IS A STREAM to emphasise how we picture our cognitive involvement with fiction through aquatic images, and how these liquid metaphors themselves offer the ground to reformulate the idea of fictional world in a more dynamic way, one that does not only involve the conception of deep, sustained attention. This more dynamic reformulation implies that when we approach fiction, we constantly shift from states of deep attention to states of moving mind wandering, in a fluid back-and-forth motion that does not impair the fruition of fiction itself, on the contrary. I particularly concentrate on how fiction can induce deliberate forms of mind wandering, and how these deliberate, partially controlled mental experiences of wandering can be associated with imaginative and creative processes. The examples I use come from disparate fictional genres and media; the way itself in which these case studies employ water metaphors differs from each other, but with underlying common elements. Woolf couples the water-based metaphors with the use of the stream of consciousness technique, hence providing an ideal example, explicitly merging the two metaphors of immersion and stream together. Both Gaiman’s text and Watanabe’s movie contain reflections expressed with water metaphors that echo Woolf’s: more specifically, reflections on the creative process, in the case of Gaiman, and reflections on the working of our consciousness more broadly, in the case of Watanabe. All texts make use of metafictional devices to offer insights into how we mentally engage with fiction; perhaps Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea is the more striking example, since in this text, the metafictional aspect is a constant integral part of the whole plot. My examples draw from the recognition that water imagery is an essential component of literary reflections on human mental processes, as recognised by Classen: “the literary evidence, both from the Middle Ages and the present world, clearly signals how much poetic reflections on water carry epistemological meaning” (Classen 2018, p. xxi). As said, the way in which my examples coming from fiction use water imagery is important in the context of my research in two senses. First, the use of water metaphors to describe cognitive processes associated with mind wandering and the experience of fiction provides support for my theoretical claims. These metaphors represent mind wandering within the fictional world, particularly as it is depicted in the minds of the characters. Second, such watery imagery can also resonate at the level of the reader’s own cognitive experience, through the activation of embodied conceptual metaphors. In this way, they may evoke a form of deliberate mind wandering, for instance prompting readers to reflect on imaginative processes—both their own and those of the characters. While empirical research is still needed to explore deliberate mind wandering in relation to textual engagement, particularly in connection with water imagery, this paper aims to offer a foundational theoretical framework for such promising research.