In 1983, the Eurythmics’ biggest hit told us:
- “Sweet dreams are made of this
- Who am I to disagree?
- I travel the world and the seven seas
- Everybody’s looking for something.”
The Eurythmics were not the first people to listen to their dreams. The Journal of Neuroscience published a study by the University of Rome that concluded dreaming is the brain’s way of processing emotions.
Several famous people attributed their successful endeavors to a dream.
Ever sat in science class and wondered how we got that confusing periodic table? To me that was a nightmare, but to chemist Dimitry Mendeleev, it was a dream come true. He had spent 10 years trying to create a pattern that connected the chemical elements together. Then, just as he was on the verge of a major breakthrough, he fell asleep. He said he dreamt up the idea he’d been searching for with a table where all the elements fell into place as required so he wrote it down on a piece of paper as soon as he woke up.
Or in sports, have you tried to correct a batting swing, a golf swing or a basketball shot? So did golfer Jack Nicholas who attests that he corrected his golf swing successfully due to a correction he made during a dream.
If you are looking up these people after this article, you may search Google, which is also the result of a dream. Google inventor, Larry Page, had an anxiety dream about being enrolled at Stanford University. In his dream, he downloaded the entire web onto some old computers lying around, so he got up in the middle of the night to do some calculations and when he realized it was possible, he went on to create what became Google.
Are you a musician, struggling to come up with a new tune. Famous musicians have claimed to have heard new songs or arrangements in their sleep and created new music as a result: Beethoven, the Beatles and Billy Joel are examples.
Maybe you are writer searching for your next bestseller. In 1816, teenager Mary Shelly had a nightmare of about what she called a hideous phantasm of a man. The next morning, she began writing Frankenstein – the world’s first sci-fi novel.
Next time you use a sewing machine or a needle, look at the eye and think of Elias Howe. In 1845, Howe said a violent nightmare led to the sewing machine. Howe dreamt that he’d been captured by cannibals who gave him an ultimatum to invent a sewing machine within 24 hours or suffer a painful death. In the dream, he failed, so they stabbed him to repeatedly with spears that had a hole in the tip. When Howe awoke, he realized he had to put an eye in the needle to create the lock-stitch sewing machine he’d always struggled to invent.
The invention of DNA science has changed the justice system, and we can thank a restless night for Dr. James Watson. In 1953, Dr. Watson saw a spiral staircase in a dream, developing the idea of a double helix spiral structure for our DNA. Watson went on to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962.
There are many more including Albert Einstein, but I will leave that to your Googling abilities (thanks to Larry Page) and remember to get your 7-8 hours of sleep tonight because you never know where your dreams will lead you!