Inventions through Dreams

The language of dreams is sensory, visual and non-linear, whereas the language of waking life is predominantly verbal. In a dream state, the "left-brain" editor is off duty, and the "right brain" can work its magic, weaving together solutions to challenges that the conscious mind might ignore if it did not come through habitual thought patterns or verbal channels. Throughout history, inventors, scientists, innovators, and artists have solved problems in their dreams, whether intentionally or not.   

Brilliant Dreams has compiled a list of twelve of these famous discoveries and creations in literature, science, music and even sports attributed to dreams, including:

Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the Benzene molecule:

"...I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis."

The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream:

"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it."

Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1845 from a dream:

He had the idea of a machine with a needle which would go through a piece of cloth but he couldn't figure out exactly how it would work. He first tried using a needle that was pointed at both ends, with an eye in the middle, but it was a failure. Then one night he dreamt he was taken prisoner by a group of natives. They were dancing around him with spears. As he saw them move around him, he noticed that their spears all had holes near their tips. When he woke up he realized that the dream had brought the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth thus making his machine operable.

For more examples, go to http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm.

Comments

[Ella]

I'm writing an article on why we can't dream the lottery numbers. I think that nothing can be dreampt except what has once existed in another mind..at somne point in time. Numbers, which are drawn or drop in an unknown sequence no one knows will be, cannot be plucked from the universal mind, therefore they cannot be dreamed.