Dreams

I've been obsessed with how ideas emerge from the subconscious during dreams.

Inspired by https://patrickcollison.com/fast, I wrote a (growing) collection of innovations and creative works that emerged from dreams. What am I missing?

Natural selection

In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace was lying ill with intermittent fever when he became convinced of the the mechanism for evolution by natural selection.

Chemical neurotransmission

Otto Loewi dreamed of an experiment demonstrating that nerves communicate chemically. He forgot the idea, then dreamed it again the following night. He immediately went to his laboratory, and performed the experiment from his dream. And then he won the Nobel Prize.

The benzene ring

After working an insane amount and being sleep deprived, August Kekulé passed out in front of a fire. Then he dreams of atoms transforming into an ouraboros (a snake biting its own tail). He realized this must be the structure of benzene.

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.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley described seeing Frankenstein's monster in a dream. a student kneeling beside the creature he had assembled as it began to show signs of life.

Don Newman’s theorem

Don Newman dreamed that John Nash explained the solution to a problem he had been grappling with for weeks. He woke with the answer and developed it into a published paper.

The Terminator

While sick with a fever in Rome, James Cameron dreamed of a chrome skeleton emerging from fire. He woke and sketched the image on hotel stationery. It became the Terminator and the film’s final sequence almost exactly.