When Maude Standish heard about Trade School, a month long skill-sharing event on the Lower East Side, she knew she wanted to be involved.

“I never taught a class before,” Standish said. “So I just thought about things I was good at.” Standish let her mind wander over skills she had that might be useful to fellow New Yorkers, and her Daydreaming Workshop was, um, daydreamed up.

Standish researched scientific and philosophical approaches to daydreaming on the Internet, and found what she considers two main types of daydreams. Task-oriented daydreams, like imagining yourself paying a bill, are grounded in reality. Fantastical daydreams, Standish said, are more useful—they’re the ones that help people move beyond their own reality.

To help develop skills in fantastical daydreaming, Standish led the class, made up mostly of young, artistic-folk, in an exercise she created.  Everyone picked two found images from a bucket–one had to be a “place,” and one a “character.” Then they got five minutes to insert themselves into the worlds they had created.

Here’s the fantastical daydream  Trade School student and blogger Joyce Hanson came up with during the exercise:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Trade School is a joint effort of OurGoods, a bartering website, and GrandOpening, an interactive art space. People lead classes for barter.  In order to attend the Daydreaming Workshop, students had to bring Standish two found images, a slip of paper with a daydream they often have written on it, and a song they get stuck in their head.

Classes on everything from “How to Make Butter,” to “Foundations in Ghost Hunting,” are going on through Monday, March 1.