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"The atmosphere into which genius leads us, and indeed all art,
is the atmosphere of the world of dreams."
--Havelock Ellis
A 2-MINUTE HISTORY OF DREAM
CREATION
by Robert Moss
Dreams and twilight states of
consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators
of human possibility throughout history. Here are some examples:
- Scientist Otto
Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically
transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
- Beethoven
composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
- Tartini
dreamed a famous violin sonata.
- Robert Louis
Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign
spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
- William Butler
Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen
ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and
visions.
- Elias Howe,
the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem
that had stumped him.
- Lucille Ball
was inspired to launch her phenomenally successful TV show by a dream in which she was
visited by a departed friend, the actress Carole Lombard (who had been killed in a plane
crash in 1942). Later Lucy’s departed mother appeared in dreams to give her business
guidance. Jack Nicklaus dreamed up a new golf grip.
- Polynesian
master navigators were able to cross thousands of miles of ocean, without maps or
instruments, because they followed courses shown to them in dreams. A priest (and royal
tattooist) called Hau Maka dreamed the way to Easter Island, describing the location in
great detail. His king and his people trusted the dreamer’s travel report. They all
set sail with everything they had and after two months sailed into Anakena Bay, which was
exactly as Hau Maka had described.
- In his speech
on acceptance of his Nobel Prize, quantum physicist Niels Bohr attributed his discoveries
to his dreams.
- Harriet
Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped 300 slaves escape to
freedom by leading them along the roads she discovered and scouted in her dreams. [source:
Dreaming True, pages xvii-xxiii]
- Robert
Moss’ novels Fire Along the Sky and The Firekeeper flowed directly from dreams in which
he entered the lives of people living on the New York frontier in the 18th
century, including Mohawk Indians, French and German soldiers and settlers, and Sir
William Johnson, the colorful Anglo-Irishman who became King’s Superintendent of
Indians.
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