Each of us has most likely experienced our minds drifting away from what we most want to think about or do at a given time. It even happens while reading. This phenomena is briefly addressed in Rationality & the Reflective Mind.
Stanovich cites a journal article, not by him, about mind wandering. It describes mind wandering as sharing "certain similarities with standard views of controlled processing, however, there is an important difference. Controlled processing is generally associated with the intentional pursuit of a goal. Mind wandering, however, often occurs without intention....mind wandering involves executive control yet seems to lack deliberate intent."
Stanovich responds: "I would argue that what [the authors] are struggling to portray here are two different kinds of Type 2 processing. One is an attempt to exhaustively model an imaginary world that would facilitate the primary task. The other is a less computationally expensive type of cognition that proceeds successively through the most convenient and salient associate of a single (often incomplete) focal model."
It seems to me that "an imaginary world" here means to consider a hypothesis, an alternative scenario, a counterfactual, or something similar, connected with pursuit of the intended goal. The second sentence in more commonplace words seems to say "our mind drifts to something not as demanding or more fun."
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