Dream Catchers
- I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody…. I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.’ – Paul McCartney about the Beatles’ “Yesterday”
- Director Christopher Nolan took the inspiration for his thriller Inception from his own lucid dreams.
- John Lennon wrote a best-selling song –“#9 Dream” based on a dream he had.
- Salvador Dali has called many of his works “hand-painted dream photographs,” and one of his most famous renderings was inspired by an actual dream.
- Stephen King gives credit to his creative works including Dream Catcher.
- Robert Louis Stevenson said, he had writers block, when he dreamed vivid scenes that became the base of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
- Stephenie Meyer pulled characters of her famous vampire love Story “Twilight” out of her dream. She described the dream, on her website: “I woke up from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire.”
- Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, often cited as the world’s first science fiction novel, was inspired by a vivid nightmare.
- In one of his dreams, Niels Bohr saw the nucleus of the atom, with electrons spinning around it, much as planets spin around their sun. The vision was accurate. Bohr is now called father of quantum physics.
- “Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905 on the brink of his breakthrough discoveries.
- The mathematical genius Ramanujan said, he repeatedly dreamed of a Hindu goddess. She presented him with complex mathematical formulas over and over, which he could then test and verify upon waking.
- August Kekulé discovered the ring shape of the Benzene molecule after having a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail.
- Abraham Lincoln Dreamt of His Assassination, Elias Howe dreamt of the design of Sewing Machine, Otto Loewi gave the theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse.
I believe man to be in himself a Trinity, viz. Mind, Body, and Soul; and thus with dreams, some induced by the mind, and some by the soul. Those connected with the mind, I think proceed partly from supernatural, and partly from natural causes; those of the soul I believe are of the immaterial world alone.
In order to support this position, it becomes necessary to show how the soul’s dream and that of the mind are distinguishable; and whether sometimes, or indeed often, they are not both at the same moment bearing their part in the nocturnal vision.
That dreams, or, as they were then generally called, visions, were a means of supernatural instruction, if we believe the bible at all, is proved by Jacob’s dream, the several visions of Ezekiel and other prophets, as also of later date, the Revelations to Saint John; and there appears no reason why this mode of divine communication should be discontinued in the present day.”
– Edgar Allan Poe