Dreaming

Every now and then I wake up with my first thought being the solution to a problem I’d been mulling over. Most recently, it was an idea of what to give our grandson and his bride as a wedding gift. I’d been pondering this for months and had not come up with anything. Then one morning I woke up with the answer: airline miles for a trip to California. Not momentous, I grant you, but a rather creative solution and totally out of the blue. This has probably happened to you, too. For one thing, I think it’s pretty common to discover that you’ve got the answer to a troublesome crossword clue that had you stumped the night before. 

Our brains do work things out while we sleep. Research has shown that the rapid-eye-movement (dreaming) segment of our sleep cycle helps us synthesize new pieces of information with existing knowledge and to make creative lateral connections.

There are plenty of examples of people who have woken up with new ideas and solutions to problems, usually as the result of a dream. For Niels Bohr, it was the structure of the atom; for Paul McCartney, it was the entire melody for “Yesterday;” for Jack Nicklaus, it was a change in his golf grip; for Mary Shelley, it was Frankenstein.

Elias Holmes, the inventor of the lock-stitch sewing machine, became stumped in his design. One night he dreamed he was building a sewing machine for a savage king who gave him 24 hours to complete it. As he was about to be executed, he noticed that the warriors carried spears that were pierced near the tips (the eyes of needles are usually at the heel). He leapt out of bed at four in the morning and finished his design by nine. 

While it’s nice to solve little problems in your sleep, it would be even nicer to come up with something you could patent—as did Holmes. You can always dream…

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.