Daydreaming, by nature, takes you to another time and place. Incredibly, a new study finds that the distance your thoughts travel to get there significantly affects how hard it is to snap back to reality.

For example, the further the mind drifts from home -- say, to a beach in Tahiti -- the harder it will be to recall details of what you were doing before that daydream.

Distance of time has a similar effect, with those people who imagine a place they haven't visited in weeks being less likely to remember their pre-daydream activities than people who envision a place they just visited.

"If you're trying to put something out of your mind -- like being stuck in a boring committee meeting -- our study shows that the best way to do that is to think of something else. In particular, something that occurred longer ago in time or is a big cultural and spatial distance away," says Peter F. Delaney, a psychological scientist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

In experiments, participants viewed different words on a computer monitor. They were then asked to think about either their own home, from where they'd recently come, or their parents' home, where they hadn't been in weeks.

A second list of words was then displayed, with participants ultimately being asked to recall as many words from the two lists as possible. Significantly, those people whose minds travelled the shorter chronological distance had an easier time remembering words they saw before their daydream.

These results were repeated when participants were asked to recall either a vacation abroad or a domestic vacation, with the former causing a stronger amnesic effect around the pre-daydream activity.

"If you change contexts, moving to a different place or changing the feelings you're having -- even if you get hungry -- all of these things affect your thoughts, and can make it harder to access memories from the original setting," says Delaney, noting that the more removed the daydreamed scenario from the current one, the harder it is to swap back and forth.

"So if your colleague comes in and asks, 'Hey, how was your trip to Egypt a month ago?' that's probably going to be far more disruptive -- as far as retrieving what you were just doing -- than if he interrupted your work to say, 'Deadline's in 30 minutes.'"