Sleep On It, Invent Something to Change the World..
Inventions that came from dreams
How many times have you heard the phrase ‘Let me sleep on it’ in connection with making a decision? And it is a good thing too, because sleeping on something gives us time to digest and think more deeply about something.
We allow our subconscious mind to work on the decision or challenge we face. How about completely immersing yourself in your passion, whatever that is and then sleeping on it and waking up to invent something amazing? Do you think this is possible? It absolutely is. Here is a list of amazing inventions that were the product of dreams.
Larry Page was a student at Stanford and dreamt that he could download the entire internet, and just keep the links, and then later he came up with the idea of a search engine, and look what it became, hello Google.
Sewing machine
Elias Howe had a nightmare that resulted in the invention of the sewing machine. In his nightmare, cannibals tasked him to invent a sewing machine in 24 hours. He failed, and the cannibals were stabbing him with spears that had holes in the tip. Elias interpreted this to mean the needle needs an eye, and thus the lockstitch sewing machine was born.
DNA
Dr James Watson saw the structure of DNA in his dream. He was dreaming of a spiral staircase and this is what gave rise to the twisted double helix structure we have all come to know so well.
Theory of relativity
Einstein saw cows huddled against an electric fence in a dream, and when the farmer switched on the electric fence, the cows all jumped away, but the farmer saw them jumping away at slightly different times, not all at once, and this gave Einstein the idea that events look different depending on where we are located, as the light will reach our eyes at different times.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley had apparently been aware of an inventor who claimed that he had found the elixir of life and, simultaneously, there were new scientific breakthroughs showing the effects of electricity on limbs.
These swirling around in her psyche and in her subconscious, I would speculate, led her to have a dream or more likely a nightmare she had when she was in Geneva, where the people she was with would spend evenings telling chilling stories to scare each other, and thus came the idea of Frankenstein. Perhaps seen as the beginning of the Sci-Fi genre.
The Periodic Table
Dmitri Mendeleev was earnestly seeking some sort of pattern to link all the chemical elements together. Being close to completing his challenge that he had spent 10 years on, he fell asleep and he dreamt about a table where all the elements fell into place and on waking he wrote it down, preserving the insight his dream had given him.
The structure of an atom
Niels Bohr won the Nobel prize for proving that at atom is like a cosmological entity, with the nucleus at the centre and the electrons orbiting or spinning around it. He saw this structure in a dream, and he had a feeling deep down, that he was correct. He spent many years proving his theory, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Salvador Dali’s paintings
Salvador Dali attributes his paintings to photographs of his dreams. He literally painted what he would see in his dreams. Looking at his amazing artwork, they definitely are the inspiration of dreams. One of my favourite artists, and of course I am not alone.
The Terminator
The product of a feverish sick man dreaming was the start of an amazing movie franchise. James Cameron had the dream and saw an explosion and then a robot or chrome skeleton, cut in half, pulling itself towards him with kitchen knives.
James drew the terminator on hotel stationery the next morning because he was staying in a hotel in Rome when he had the dream.
So what?
Most of us aren’t as lucky or connected to our dreams and thoughts to come up with amazing inventions or scientific hypotheses, or blockbuster movies, but perhaps we should take note more of our dreams and what they could tell us, perhaps we are all missing out on some amazing inspiration?