Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam once said, “A dream is not what we see while sleeping, it is the thing that keeps us awake.” This is true, but sometimes dreams that occur during sleep refuse to be erased from memory; instead, they wake the sleeper, plant an idea, and quietly alter human history. This is not fantasy or science fiction. It is a common pattern observed across different eras and fields, including science, art, literature, music, and even engineering. It’s as if the sleeping mind, with a hidden strategy fitting a crucial battle, is constantly at work while we think we are resting. Maybe we place too much value on our waking thoughts. Perhaps we underestimate and sometimes ignore the wild cinema that our brains play out without our consent. This essay explores the top ten dreams that have proven to be more valuable than reality—dreams that gifted us atoms, molecules, machines, equations, melodies, monsters, and entirely new ways of thinking. Here, we pursue the dreams that not only inspire genius but also create it.
What We Think Dreams Are—And What They Actually Do
Most of us grow up believing dreams are just background noise, a strange mix of yesterday’s feelings, random faces, and bizarre little scenes put together without reason. Freud once called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious”(Freud, 1899. We think of dreams as soft metaphors or previews of our insecurities, our fears, but never as serious sources of insight. And honestly, who would trust a sleeping brain when the waking one struggles to make sense of life? And surprisingly, with the coming of the modern age, Neuroscience has upgraded a lot, but the real nature of dreams remains a mystery. Why we dream is a question that keeps scientists, philosophers, and restless thinkers awake at night. But one thing seems almost certain: whatever a dream is, it comes from the deep unconscious, a place we barely understand.
Freud may seem outdated in many ways, but he deserves recognition for being the first to take dreams seriously. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he argued that dreams carry hidden desires and emotional roots (Freud, 1899). What Freud got right is that dreams help us process emotional tension. What he got wrong is his obsession with treating dreams like puzzles. Yet, his belief that dreams matter opened the door for future thinkers.
Carl Jung expanded that door. He believed dreams spoke the psyche’s “native language,” often pulling symbols from a deeper collective memory (Jung, 1964). For Jung, a dream is not just yours; it is humanity speaking through you. He argued that dreams can carry creative energy because they bypass the ego and reach the deeper mind directly. Whether one agrees with Jung or not, this idea aligns well with stories of discoveries made through dreams.
Modern science eventually joined the discussion. In the 1970s, researchers J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed that dreams were simply the brain trying to make sense of random signals during REM sleep (Hobson & McCarley, 1977). Their theory made dreams appear meaningless again, which comforted many people. But as research advanced, this explanation began to unravel.
Researchers like Matthew Walker, Rosalind Cartwright, and Giulio Tononi demonstrated that dreams aid memory, problem-solving, emotional balance, and pattern recognition (Walker, 2017; Cartwright, 2010). Cartwright found that dreams reorganise emotional memories coming from the right hemisphere of the brain. Walker discovered that sleep significantly boosts creative problem-solving. Tononi argues that dreams may allow the brain to explore possible worlds in a safe environment. Suddenly, dreams shifted from seeming like static to looking like construction sites.
Next came studies that directly investigated creativity. Researchers like Ullman, Lippman, and later Deirdre Barrett at Harvard found numerous examples of people solving real problems through dreams. Barrett referred to dreams as “a committee of sleep,” a space where the mind freely rearranges ideas without logical constraints (Barrett, 2001). In her studies, artists, scientists, writers, coders, mathematicians, and engineers reported breakthroughs that came from dreams. She described dreams as a mental workshop where ideas get rearranged in ways our waking minds would never consider.
Thus, the idea that dreams are meaningless falls apart in light of this evidence. In fact, dreams are not just escapes from reality; they are different paths into it. This leads us to a significant blind spot. And maybe when the world sleeps, the mind quietly starts revolutions.
Dream 1: Descartes and the Three Dreams That Rewired Knowledge
Delmore Schwartz once wrote, “In dreams begins responsibility,” and for René Descartes, that line was literal. Often called the father of modern philosophy and the mind behind analytic geometry, Descartes had the night that changed everything on November 10, 1619. Alone beside a stove in a cold German town, he dreamed three visions so sharp and unsettling that he believed they carried a message about the direction of his life (Lawton, 2024). In the first dream, the chaotic winds and his staggering body felt like a warning about the instability of old knowledge, a push away from the confusion of medieval scholasticism toward something firmer. In the second, the thunderclap and sparks of fire struck him as a revelation of reason, a sign that clarity would come not from inherited authority but from disciplined thought. The third dream, the quietest, placed two books before him, a dictionary and a poetry collection, which he read as symbols of how the sciences and philosophy belonged to one shared search for understanding, guided by Ausonius’ question, “Which way of life shall I follow?” (Lawton, 2024). Descartes answered by rebuilding knowledge from first principles, making philosophy the root of everything that counts as science today (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023). That choice shaped his method, his mathematics, and his fierce belief that doubt is a tool rather than a flaw. It also helped push Europe away from tradition toward reason. Whether we praise him or critique him, modern scientific thinking, with its clarity, scepticism, method, and its demand that truth must earn its place, still carries the fingerprints of those dreams. The paradox is hard to ignore: a man who trusted dreams ended up giving science its rational backbone. One night of visions became the beginning of a new way of knowing.
Dream 2: When the Goddess Wrote Equations
Among the many legends surrounding Srinivasa Ramanujan, none is more unsettling or revealing than the dream in which the goddess Namagiri presents him with mathematics. Start with the equation itself, one of those rare creatures that feels almost too elegant to be real:
It computes (\pi) so quickly that when early supercomputers were pushing the limits of high-precision arithmetic, they relied on Ramanujan’s formulas because nothing else converged fast enough. And the origin story? He did not arrive at this through the slow, patient grind of textbook derivation. He said he received it. As Ramanujan described it, “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were.” Onto this crimson curtain, a hand appeared, and it began writing elliptic integrals one after another, with the calm exactness of a teacher on the other side of consciousness (Kanigel, 1991). When Ramanujan awoke, he wrote down everything he could recall. One of the structures he later captured corresponds to a general form of an elliptic integral: a formulation that lies deep within the theory of modular functions and analytic number theory, and now has applications stretching from string theory to black-hole thermodynamics (Berndt & Rankin, 2000). And not only just these two Ramanujan’s dream-fed results reappear across modern number theory, q-series, partition functions, and even contemporary physics.
Dream 3: When Niels Bohr Dreamed the Atom Into Orbit
If Ramanujan’s dream arrived with the force of revelation, Niels Bohr’s came with the quiet precision of a diagram. Around 1911 or 1912, in the midst of his struggle to make sense of Rutherford’s newly proposed nuclear atom, Bohr reportedly dreamed of a miniature solar system. In the dream, electrons orbited a central nucleus the way planets move around the sun, stable yet in motion. When he woke, the image struck him as more than a metaphor. It offered a structural clarity he had been unable to achieve through calculation alone. This vision later crystallised into the Bohr model, the first atomic structure that successfully explained hydrogen’s spectral lines and introduced a quantised view of electron behaviour (Pais, 1991).
Though the Bohr model, despite its enormous historical influence, is fundamentally incorrect. Quantum mechanics quickly replaced Bohr’s tidy orbits with the probabilistic machinery of wave functions, orbitals, and uncertainty. And Bohr himself, as a founding architect of quantum theory, helped dismantle the simple solar-system picture his model had introduced. Yet this does not diminish the dream’s importance. The image served as a conceptual bridge at a moment when atomic theory had no stable ground, and serves as a model that would later open the path that physics needed.
Dream 4: When Dmitri Mendeleev Watched the Elements Arrange Themselves
In February 1869, exhausted from weeks of struggling to organise the known chemical elements, Mendeleev fell asleep at his desk. His notes were scattered, his frustration at its peak. According to his later recollection, in that brief sleep he saw the elements “fall into place” on a table, each occupying its rightful slot in a logical sequence of properties and atomic weights (Mendeleev, 1899/1968). When he woke, he wrote down the arrangement almost exactly as it appears in the first published version of the periodic table.
In this way, Mendeleev’s dream produced a logical structure that allowed for predictions. The periodic table, born partly from a dream, became one of the most powerful organising frameworks in the history of science. It allowed chemists to see relationships that had been invisible, to anticipate new substances before they existed, and to understand matter not as a chaotic collection but as a structured, repeating pattern. Modern chemistry, quantum theory, and materials science continue to refine it, but its backbone remains unmistakably Mendeleev’s.
Dream 5: Kekulé’s Ouroboros and the Birth of the Benzene Ring
Sometime in the 1860s, after years of frustration over the puzzling stability of aromatic compounds, Friedrich August Kekulé entered a half-sleep while riding a London omnibus. In that drifting state, he saw chains of atoms “twisting and turning like snakes,” until one snake curled back and bit its own tail(Kekulé,1890). The image of the Ouroboros, an ancient emblem of circularity and renewal, crystallised in his mind as the structural key he had been missing. In his 1890 Benzolfest speech, he recounted the vision and urged young chemists to “learn to dream,” although even then he framed it as a moment when intuition rearranged ideas he had been labouring over for years.
The insight changed the discipline. When Kekulé published the cyclic structure of benzene in 1865, he shifted organic chemistry from descriptive cataloguing to structural reasoning. The idea that carbon atoms could form a stable ring allowed chemists to understand aromaticity, bonding patterns, and the behaviour of conjugated molecules with unprecedented coherence. Later, quantum theory refined the details, but the conceptual leap remained foundational.
Dream 6: The Spark, the Soup, and the Unruly Story of Neurotransmission
The history of neurotransmission has its own dreamlike moment, though here the “dream” unfolded in a laboratory lit by cigarette smoke. In 1921, Otto Loewi reportedly awoke in the middle of the night with the solution to a question that had tormented physiologists for decades: How do nerves talk to muscles? He scribbled an experiment on a scrap of paper, fell back asleep, and by morning had forgotten the idea entirely. The next night, the same vision returned with greater force. This time, he forced himself out of bed, rushed to his lab, and performed what would become one of the most elegant demonstrations in neuroscience (Loewi 1936).
The experiment was disarmingly simple. Loewi stimulated the vagus nerve of a frog’s heart, slowing its beat. He then transferred the surrounding perfusion fluid to a second heart. The second heart slowed too. Something chemical, something dissolvable, was carrying the message. Loewi called it Vagusstoff, the substance of the vagus. The world later named it acetylcholine. With this sleepy midnight act, the long-standing debate between the “spark” theorists, who believed nerves communicated electrically, and the “soup” theorists, who argued for chemical mediation, tipped decisively toward the chemical view (Valenstein 2005).
Dream 7: Elias Howe and the Needle with the Hole in Its Heart
The story of the sewing machine’s invention is stitched literally through a dream. In 1845, after months of failed prototypes and financial pressure, Elias Howe struggled to design a mechanical needle that could mimic the fluid motion of hand sewing, but every idea collapsed. Then, according to Howe’s later account, he dreamed he had been captured by warriors who demanded he complete his machine or face death. In the dream, their spears had holes near their tips. That tiny detail, absurd and theatrical, jolted him awake. A needle with the eye at the point rather than the end—that was the missing mechanism (Cooper 1967).
When Howe reworked his design with the pointed-end eye, the solution unfolded cleanly. The machine could now pass a thread through fabric and form a lockstitch, the essential motion that had eluded him for so long. His 1846 patent became one of the crucial innovations of the industrial era, reshaping textile labour, domestic life, and global manufacturing.
Dream 8: Salvador Dalí and the Art of Catching Dreams Before They Flee
Salvador Dalí, the most famous Italian painter, did not wait for dreams to visit him; he hunted them. Unlike the scientists whose visions arrived unbidden in the night, Dalí engineered his dreams. His method, which he called “slumber with a key,” was simple but uncanny. He would sit in a chair holding a metal key between his fingers. As he drifted into the first stage of sleep, his muscles relaxed, the key slipped, and the clang on the plate below snapped him awake. In that fraction of a second, Dalí seized the images that hovered between waking and sleeping—the melting clocks, the elongated shadows, the bending landscapes that would later dominate his canvases (Dalí 1942).
Dalí insisted these flashes were not mere fantasies but glimpses of the mind freed from logic. The famous Persistence of Memory (1931), often interpreted as a meditation on time’s mutability, grew out of this twilight state. And thus Dalí’s dreams served as raw material, and his waking intellect refined their form.
Dream 9: Mary Shelley’s Night Vision and the Birth of Frankenstein
In June 1816, during the now-legendary “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley found herself in a damp Swiss villa with Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Polidori, and a sky that refused to clear. With the world outside darkened by volcanic ash and the group trapped indoors, Byron proposed a contest: each would write a ghost story. Mary struggled at first. Nothing came. Then, one night, after listening to a heated discussion about the nature of life and the possibility of reanimating matter, she experienced what she later called a “waking dream.” She saw, with unnerving clarity, a pale student kneeling beside the thing he had assembled, “the hideous phantasm of a man,” and she watched it stir with a faint, horrifying vitality (Shelley 1831).
Shelley interpreted the dream as a revelation of the anxieties simmering beneath early industrial science—the fear that human ambition might trespass into domains once reserved for nature or God. The dream’s force came from its paradox: a creature made by human hands yet condemned to be forever outside humanity. She wrote the novel at nineteen, building the entire story outward from that first spectral vision. And Frankenstein became one of the foundational texts of modern speculative fiction, the first true modern myth of scientific overreach.
Dream 10: When Paul McCartney Woke Up With “Yesterday”
Among all dream-born creations, this one is most surprising. No cosmic equations like Ramanujan. No atomic diagrams like Bohr. No stitched-together monsters like Mary Shelley. Just a tune. A tune so clean, so complete, so heartbreakingly simple that Paul McCartney woke up thinking he must have stolen it.
Sometime in 1964, while staying at the home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher, McCartney dreamed a melody. It arrived fully formed if someone had placed it in his head while he slept, floating on a piano that wasn’t even really there. When he woke, he rushed to the instrument beside the bed and played it through, half-dazed, half-suspicious. The working title he gave it, famously, was “Scrambled Eggs.” Because who on earth dreams a future classic?
McCartney spent weeks asking friends, producers, and even music publishers whether they’d heard the tune before. No one had. The dream had given him something original, but so archetypal it felt like it had existed forever. Only later did he let himself accept it as his own and shape it into “Yesterday,” a song that would become one of the most recorded and recognisable melodies in modern music history.
Therefore, across these stories, one pattern emerges: dreams return—not only to the celebrated minds who end up in textbooks but to every ordinary person trying to make sense of their life. The difference is not in who dreams, but in who listens long enough to notice that something is stirring beneath the noise. A dream, even the small ones we forget by breakfast, often carries a thread of meaning woven out of fears, memories, unspoken questions, and the strange wisdom our waking mind is too proud to admit it needs.
Maybe that is why nearly every innovation, whether in science, art, engineering, or everyday life, carries a ghost of some forgotten night—an image, a feeling, a half-formed insight that finally pushes a person toward a new way of doing things. And perhaps dreams make the future long before the future makes sense.
By: Lina Mandal
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