Dreams

Some examples of consequential ideas that arrived through dreams, fevers, and the borderlands of consciousness.

• Natural selection. In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace was lying ill with intermittent fever on Ternate when Malthus’s ideas flashed into his mind and gave him the mechanism for evolution by natural selection. Source.
• Chemical neurotransmission. Otto Loewi dreamed an experiment demonstrating that nerves communicate chemically. He forgot the idea, dreamed it again the following night, immediately went to his laboratory, and performed the experiment that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. Source.
• The benzene ring. While dozing beside a fire, August Kekulé saw atoms transform into a snake biting its own tail. The image led him to benzene’s ring structure. Source.
• “Yesterday.” Paul McCartney woke with the melody fully formed, played it on the piano beside his bed, and spent weeks asking people whether he had accidentally remembered someone else’s song. Source.
• Frankenstein. Mary Shelley described seeing the central image of Frankenstein in a waking dream: a student kneeling beside the creature he had assembled as it began to show signs of life. Source.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed key scenes from the story, woke screaming, and turned the material into the novella. Source.
• Don Newman’s theorem. After repeatedly failing to solve a mathematical problem, Don Newman dreamed that John Nash explained the solution to him. He woke with the answer and developed it into a published paper. Source.