We have now arrived at the point in our Inception Series where the rubber meets the road. It’s valuable to know where dreams come from, how they work, and understand the different theories surrounding their significance. But, is there tangible evidence demonstrating the life-altering potential of significant dreams?
As I found out, there are several significant examples of this phenomenon and I will provide three examples in today’s piece that will cover a wide range of fields. The first of these fields will be film.
Significant Dreams in Film
Shortly after beginning his career in 1978, James Cameron found a tremendous opportunity. The original director for the film Piranha II: The Spawning left the project, allowing Cameron, the film’s special effects director, to be promoted to the director’s chair. While shooting in Rome, Cameron became ill. Couped up in his hotel room, he experienced the following dream:
“It was the image of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire. When I woke up, I began sketching on the hotel stationery…The first sketch I did showed a metal skeleton cut in half at the waist, crawling over a tile floor, using a large kitchen knife to pull itself forward while reaching out with the other hand. In a second drawing, the character is threatening a crawling woman.”
Sound familiar? If you’re a cinephile, then you should already know what film he’s describing. If you’re not a cinephile, I’ll answer that question for you: he’s talking about Terminator. Yes, the idea for this blockbuster franchise which gave rise to the career of one of Hollywood’s greatest directors came from a dream.
Significant Dreams in Technology
The second example comes from the technology field. The dream described below was outlined by a founder at his alma mater during a commencement address. You don’t need to be a technology nerd to determine who the founder is, just think of the first place you’d go to research anything.
“…I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work…”
If you guessed this dream Larry Page’s and it was about Google, you’d be right. It occurred during the first year of Page’s PhD program at Stanford when he was charged with choosing his doctoral thesis topic. He’d considered everything from telepresence to self-driving cars to the mathematical properties of the newly created world wide web. Luckily for us, this dream clarified his pursuit.
Significant Dreams in Science
Our third example is perhaps the most significant of the three as it laid the foundation for an entire science. Two years into writing The Principles of Chemistry, Dimitry Mendeleev hit a wall in his attempt to organize the elements. At the time, there were two conflicting organization methods – atomic weight and material properties. Mendeleev was attempting to prove the two methods could be unified.
Early in his research, he drew inspiration from the “American” game of solitaire. He began carrying a deck of 63 cards, each one labeled with an element’s atomic weight and material properties. However, no matter how he organized these cards, he do it in a repeatable manner. Then, after three days of no sleep, he passed out. During his slumber, Mendeleev had a breakthrough:
“I saw in a dream, a table, where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”
In his table, the elements were organized such that as atomic mass increased, there was a repeated pattern in the element’s material properties. This pattern became known as the Periodic Law and the resulting Periodic Table was then published to a Russian Science Journal. In the table, he left room for fifteen undiscovered elements. When said elements were discovered 15 years later, they fit perfectly into Mendeleev’s framework, cementing his organization method.
Circumstantial Requirements for Significant Dreams
As I stated at the beginning, there are a plethora of examples I could’ve used to demonstrate the potential power of dreams. I chose these three examples due to their breadth of subject matter and significance to modern society. However, it’s important to note there are a couple crucial circumstances required for dreams to have such potential.
First, all three individuals were fully immersed in their chosen pursuits. Cameron was on-set, Page was in his PhD program, and Mendeleev was in the midst of publishing his book. The idea fragments needed for such dreams to occur were already present. Furthermore, they were likely leveraging these fragments on a daily basis. Their dreams were not random thoughts but rather reorganized ones.
Second, all three individuals were uncomfortable, albeit for different reasons. In Cameron’s case, he was ill in a foreign country directing his first major film. In Page’s, he was on the other side of the United States researching a misunderstood, revolutionary technology. And, although he stayed local, Mendeleev’s discomfort came in the form of sleep deprivation and, in a similar manner to Page, researching a misunderstood subject.
Stimulating the Brain
At the highest of high levels, the brain needs to be stimulated for it to work at both a conscious and unconscious level. We discuss this stimulation and the subsequent neurological processes in another Becoming Polymathic Piece – Sparks, a Story of Interest.
The only difference between this piece and Sparks is context. In Sparks, we contextualized these processes from the perspective of discovering one’s interests. In this piece, we contextualized these processes from the perspective of discovering the significance of one’s dreams.
We will conclude this series in the next piece by answering to our original question – can dreams be leveraged on the journey of being more?
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.” – Larry Page, Co-Founder Google-Alphabet