Answers in Your Dreams

When you dream, you enter an alternative state of consciousness—a time when true inspiration can strike

BY DEIRDRE BARRETT

Source: Scientific American

As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled.

One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution. Nash explained how to solve it. Newman awoke realizing he had the answer! He spent the next several weeks turning the insight into a formal paper, which was then published in a mathematics journal.

Newman is hardly alone in making a practical breakthrough during a night of sleep. While dreaming, Friedrich August Kekulé came up with the structure of benzene, Dmitry Mendeleev conjured up his final form of the periodic table of the elements and Otto Loewi thought of the neuroscience experiment that won him a Nobel Prize in medicine.

Modern engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang dreamed designs for laser-telescope controls and laser computing, respectively. Innumerable artists and filmmakers have depicted images that came to them in their sleep. Mary Shelley dreamed the two main scenes that became Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson did the same with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel all awoke to discover new tunes ringing in their minds. Mahatma Gandhi’s call for a nonviolent protest of British rule of India was inspired by a dream.

Yet dreams so often seem incoherent, bizarre or even trivial. We search intensely for our brother in an endless maze of corridors because we must give him a yellow package. But when we find him, we have forgotten the package—which we are certainly not holding any longer—and anyway he is now a neighbor, not a brother. Other dreams are ephemeral—we wake up thinking about a yellow box, but that is all we recall.

For decades scientists have puzzled over how dreams could display such diverse characteristics. Research is now suggesting that dreams are simply thought in a different biochemical state. The physiological demands of sleep alter the way the brain functions. Dreams may seem bizarre or nonsensical because the chemistry of the sleeping brain affects how we perceive our own thoughts, but we nonetheless continue focusing on all the same issues that concern us while we are awake. This unusual state of consciousness is often a blessing for problem solving—it helps us find solutions outside our normal patterns of thought. By following a few simple steps, we can even harness this power, encouraging our sleeping brain to ruminate on particular concerns.

Read further

Additional reading

Video: Laughter is the best cure for psychics

Neurobiology of Dreams and Revelation

Al Aleem: The Bestower of true dreams

Revealing Dreams of Scientists

The Nature of Revelation

True Nature of Divine Revelations

We Dream, Therefore God Is!

Why does the Science of Consciousness Need a Muslim Theologian and a Sleep Specialist?