‘Transported’ Review: Lost in a Musical Daydream
A Book Review Review
No, that double word in the subtitle isn’t an error; as opposed to reviewing a full book as I have in the past, I’m reviewing a review of a book!
And that book is Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams by Elizabeth Margulis, Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Music at Princeton University.
Levels of Experiences
The review, by Sarah Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal, immediately caught my eye because of the book title. As I wrote about in chapter 4 of The Transformation Economy (pp. 83-92), there are four levels of experiences, here in order of greatest value:
Transformative
Transporting
Meaningful
Memorable
In short, memorable experiences engage you; meaningful experiences connect with who you are; transporting experiences take you out of who you are; and transformative experiences change who you are. (Always remember: all transformation is identity change.) I introduced the third level of transporting experiences with this paragraph:
When you create memorable and meaningful experiences, you have the further opportunity to make them transporting. Transporting experiences instill wonderment, shift you beyond the present moment, and move you metaphorically to another realm, to a transcendent and liminal space and time. They do not by themselves change who you are, but can greatly change your state of heart, mind, body, and spirit while more easily leading to the truly transformative.
Daydreams are transporting experiences
The Transporting Experience of Daydreaming
So daydreams are transporting experiences. As journalist Kaufman summarizes the book:
Researchers have begun poking around in our musical daydreams. According to Elizabeth Margulis’s fascinating “Transported,” these dreams are wilder, more autobiographical and more communal than ordinary moments of mind-wandering. In many cases, you and I and complete strangers daydream alike to the same songs. Just as musical reveries reveal our secret selves, they also point to what we share with others.
Ms. Margulis, a former classical pianist who directs the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, defines a musical daydream as any kind of imagining you have while listening to music, “fueled in some way—whether you know it or not—by what you’re hearing.”
Have you ever had a musical daydream? My first thought was how I sometimes get an earworm – a song I can’t get out of my head – but I don’t recall any specific daydreams that accompanied it. But Margulis is talking about daydreaming while listening to music, and I constantly listen to music while working (mostly contemporary jazz, some classical, with new age on the weekend). I know I’ve had musical daydreams, getting lost in the reverie and letting my subconscious go where it will. It is transporting, and often productively so.
I’ve had daydreams that transport me, often productively so
And not just for individuals, but they can also be for multiple people in the same space and time. They may imagine the same things in response to particular musical passages, or “shared plot points”. As the book reviewer continues,
Musical daydreams, Ms. Margulis writes, are “among the most profound confirmations that radical interconnectedness lies at the heart of human cognition.”
To examine that interconnectedness, she introduces such concepts as “pervasive sensory entanglement”—the state in which our brains exist, with all our senses chattering away at one another. Smell mingles with sight and taste. Sound, we learn, connects to sight—imagined sight. When you hear a series of crisp, reverberating smacks outside your window, you visualize your neighbor’s child bouncing a basketball down the street. And if you hear trembling violins and thrumming cellos, you might lapse into a vision of storm-whipped waves.
The book author also “sees practical uses for musical daydreams”:
She urges the medical profession to study music’s ability to “kickstart new patterns of thought” through daydreams as an alternative to drugs. One of her most moving chapters describes how people with Alzheimer’s gain temporary access to memories of who they are when they hear songs from their own reminiscence bumps.
I believe this is an element used by The Hogeweyk, a “dementia village” that I discuss in chapter 1.
Daydreaming as Virtuality
The issue of how much time we spend daydreaming, or listening to music for that matter, arises out of concern for today’s media-saturated, attention-blasted environment:
It won’t surprise you that nowadays our daydreaming time is shrinking, one more thing squashed by social media. Studies conducted 20 years ago showed that we spent between 30% and 50% of our time in creatively fruitful “mental drift.” Now that digital habits take up so much of our down time, who knows how much space we have left to fill with daydreams? But Ms. Margulis finds that our music-listening habits have stayed the same, at around 15% of our waking hours. This is where “thoughts can still flow spontaneously.” And that’s important because, the author tells us, for our naturally “phantasmagoric” minds, the meandering state feeds our imaginations and stokes creativity.
This passage made me think of what my coauthor Kim Korn and I wrote about in Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier on “Virtuality”. The book is all about how to fuse the real and the virtual to create more remarkable experiences at all levels, but especially transporting ones (even though I didn’t have that terminology then). I won’t go into the details of the core framework there, but it describes how digital technologies can expand the three dimensions of all experiences – time, space, and matter – to open up new possibility via their antitheses: no-time (autonomous events), no-space (virtual places), and no-matter (digital bits). Virtuality is the state of being fully immersed in no-time, no-space, and no-matter.
Daydreams offer a form of Virtuality
But in the writing I realized that Virtuality did not require the use of digital technology! Allow me to offer this extended excerpt from the section “Virtuality Unbound” (pp. 94-96):
Of course, in reality, if you think about it, all we can ever live in is an ever-on, always accessible here and now. That is the nature of real life. What digital technology does (for good and ill, it must be said) is intensify that life, increase its reach, and, yes, telescope what is accessible to make nearly everything within reach, virtually.
There is, however, an older way of moving beyond what lies physically at our fingertips, a way that predates digital technology: our imagination.
Long before the Internet made all information accessible—every book that has ever been published, every paper that has ever been written, seemingly every thought that has ever been thunk—we could read books and imagine. In our mind’s eye we could escape the humdrum of everyday life and see vistas unknown, travel to places unexplored, encounter dramas untold, and, with Plato, contemplate ideals unappreciated. Before the telephone, we could listen to the stories of others—true stories as well as made- up ones— and picture them in our mind, maybe dream of being the protagonist, the hero saving the day. Before radio and TV and movies—all varieties of Virtuality themselves, with the primary experience happening on a screen—kids could break free of the boundaries of parental expectations and communal constraints through play, unadulterated fun where anything can happen and often does. Before the personal computer and the PlayStation, before Nintendo DS and the iPhone, we all could compete in games defined by rules of our own making, or join in with others on well- worn pastimes with rich histories.
In each case you can see Virtuality at work. No, not Virtuality enabled by digital technology, but Virtuality still conceived in imagination and birthed in immateriality, enabling experiences otherwise impossible in Reality.
And so it is with daydreams as well.
The Core Message
I’ll close with this quote from the journalist on Margulis’ work:
Her book is the message in a bottle, urging us to connect more deeply with our inattention.
That, too, was at least an element of what Kim and I encouraged in Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier . So I recommend Elizabeth Margulis’ book Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams as well.
Or at the very least, read the book review!
Joe
© 2026 B. Joseph Pine II