I spotted an old beach ball in my shed the other day and I was suddenly transported to a joyful memory of running and splashing with my children on the sand at low tide. Psychologists call this ‘positive involuntary mental imagery’ – and they’re testing out ways to deliberately seed more such images (not least because experiencing them is associated with being more optimistic and less depressed). It’s early days for the research, but there’s no reason why we can’t try out one of the methods for ourselves.

To give it a go, take some photos from your daily life, such as what you see when you first get up in the morning; your trip to work; or from a typical evening out. Next, for each photo, combine it in your mind with a positive word, such as ‘pleasant’, ‘success’ or ‘triumph’, to create a completely new imagined scene. For instance, say you took a photo of your morning coffee cup. You’d look at the photo and, to combine it with the word ‘pleasant’, you could create a mental image of yourself sitting by a campfire with friends, savouring a hot chocolate from the mug. The idea is that when you encounter the real objects in the photos – such as your morning coffee cup – it serves as a trigger for the associated imagined scene while you go about your daily life.

A team led by Mahdi Bagheri at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany – and including the Psyche author Simon Blackwell – enjoyed modest success with this very approach in a recent study published in the journal Memory. They think one trick to boosting the technique’s effectiveness is choosing the right photos – distinct enough to create a memorable association with the positive mental image you created (for the example above, try photographing your mug from an unusual angle), but not so unusual that you never actually encounter the trigger in your daily life.

Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.

There is a special kind of boredom that comes from listening to people talk about their dreams, so I’ll spare you. It’s enough to relay that I was being relentlessly chased by a rather large and ornery capybara, and that the incident was extremely trying. Then, a couple days later, I came across a passage in E R Dodds’s classic The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) that really made me laugh. Homer, or the bards he represents, clearly suffered from the same anxiety-inducing nightmare of being chased as I did – as we all do – because he describes an event in the Iliad like this: ‘as in a dream one flees and another cannot pursue him – the one cannot stir to escape, nor the other to pursue him – so Achilles could not overtake Hector in running, nor Hector escape him.’

Those moments of recognition across gulfs of time and culture are always affirming. No matter our differences, we’re all afflicted by the same dreamy frustration of trying to get away. But, as usually happens with the ancients, recognition swiftly gives way to strangeness. Dodds says that the Greeks often took their dreams to be messages from the gods, in which an authoritative personage is dispatched to inform the dreamer what’s going to happen or what needs to be done. Homer himself naturally became a common emissary, telling Socrates the date of his death and giving Alexander the Great some much-needed encouragement.

Given how demented dreams seem when reviewed in the light of day, I’m glad that they aren’t likely to be missives from the higher-ups. But it’s still a comforting thought that, regardless of how we interpret our dreams, all of us take a nightly sojourn into the phantasmagoric realms – and wake up wondering what the hell it all means.