Dreams do tell us who we are and what interests us. Dreams help creative persons to create their best. Goethe solved many definite scientific problems in his dreams and also composed poems. La Fontaine composed The Fable of Pleasures in his dream. Coleridge was in deep sleep, when 200 to 300 lines of the, Rime of the Ancient Mariner came to him and he was fortunate enough to wake instantly and write them. The same process occurred with Kubla Khan. Bernhard Palissay made one of his most beautiful ceramic pieces on dream inspiration. Maury confesses: I have had in dream ideas and inspiration that could never have entered my consciousness when I awake. R L Stevensons ingenious plots were evolved in his dream state. The chapter on Dreams by him in his volume Across the Plains contains a description of most successful dream experiments thus far recorded. Yeats, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare, Richard Church are the poets to whom inspiration came in dreams. Materlink also frequently dreamed parts of his books and wrote, Unless we are guilty of Systematic and childish incredulity, we are compelled to admit that prophetic dreams have always existed and they must definitely be classed among the most defensible acquisitions of metaphysics. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great mathematical genius of Tamilnad, India worked out mathematics during dreams. Mr. Subbarayan wrote:Ramanujan was staying for sometime with my father in Triplicane, Madras. Both of them used to work mathematics on slates till 11.30 pm. On several days during this period Ramanujan would get up from sleep at about 2 p.m and write down something in the slate in the dull light of the hurricane lamp. In regard to this action, he used to say that he worked out mathematics in his dreams and was jotting down the results then and there to remember them the next day. The celebrated mathematician, Henri Poincare, tried day after day to discover some general method by which a whole group of equations could be solved. He related that one night he retired to rest, after thinking deeply on the problem for a long time, and on getting up the next morning discovered to his intense surprise on his table several sheets of paper on which he had worked out a complete solution to the problem. In 1932, the famous naturalist Professor Agassiz was busy with his monumental study of fossil fishes. In one case he could not reconstruct the fish from the imprint left on the slab. At this juncture he experienced three dreams of the fish on succeeding nights. In the third dream the entire fish stood reconstructed before him. He then drew on paper in the dark a copy of his vision and on consulting the slab in the morning found that the dream reconstruction was correct. There are hundreds of such incidents one may quote. One after other the great writers, poets and artists confirm the fact that the work comes to them from beyond the threshold of consciousness. |
