Dreams and Humankind

The caveman must have dreamt of saber tooth tigers chasing him through the savanna like grasslands of Africa, running for his life.  He must have screamed and woken up to see the frightened eyes of other tribesmen looking at him with wondering eyes. In his primitive speech he must have explained that he was having a nightmare. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein after a dream.  It is said that Beatle Paul McCartney heard a beautiful melody in a dream and on waking he played it out on his piano. Otto Loewi (1873-1961), the  German born physiologist, who had  won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses,  obtained the spark of intuition during a dream and  had written it down on a piece of paper.  On waking, he was unable to read what he had written.  Luckily he again dreamt of the same idea and waking up, he went to his laboratory, did an experiment that conclusively proved that nerve impulses were basically chemical. Abraham Lincoln's     dream that someone had assassinated the President, later turned out to be  tragically true. 

 Chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the tetravalent nature of carbon, explained the formation of chemical- organic "Structure Theory" and the structure of the Benzene molecule, all because he dreamt of dancing molecules. In 1845, Elias Howe who  was working on an idea of a  sewing machine, was unable to figure out  a practical  method to enable the thread to go through  the needle. Then he had a dream.  He was taken prisoner by a group of natives who began to dance with spears which had holes near their tips. On waking up, he applied this technique and made a practical sewing machine.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,  after he saw the story in a dream. He was upset when his wife prematurely  woke him up  as he had been screaming in terror. Stevenson realized  that he could turn the dream into a superb  horror story. One of India's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.  He always attributed that he got his inspiration   from goddess Namakkal who appeared in his dreams.  Louis Agassiz (1807-1883), the Swiss naturalist, zoologist, geologist, and teacher who had emigrated to the US in 1846, saw in a number of dreams the actual fish he had seen as a fossil.  On partially waking up from his third dream, Agassiz made a drawing of the fish as it would have been when alive and later he was astonished as it exactly matched the fossil specimen. There are other cases of authors who had written short stories and novels based on their dream sequences. I had a friend who once dreamt that he escaped being run down by a car just in front of the flyover near the office. The very next day, he had an actual experience of nearly being hit by a speeding car, exactly in the same place he had seen in his dream.