Throughout history, dreams have been seen as the key to unlocking many things—human creativity, the unconscious, the future. Many great thinkers—politicians, generals, artists, musicians, athletes, and scientists—have credited dreams with the power of prophecy or the gift of inspiration. For some historical figures, it literally came to them in a dream.

Statesmen
Abraham Lincoln was a big believer that dreams were portents of things to come. A few days before his assassination, Lincoln recounted to his wife and a friend a dream he had had in which he came upon mourners in the East Room of the White House and asked who had died; the answer was “the president.” He had another recurring dream as well, which he described to Ulysses S. Grant: “Ever since this [Civil War] began, I have had the same dream just before every event of great national importance.” That night, he was killed by John Wilkes Booth.

The infamously cruel Roman emperor Caligula also dreamed of his assassination, but Adolf Hitler was reportedly saved by a dream he had. As a young German soldier, the future Nazi führer was sleeping in a trench on the front lines of World War I, when he dreamt that he was buried under an avalanche of earth and red-hot debris. He woke and left the trench, which was shelled shortly afterward, killing the soldiers inside.

Scientists
Modern organic chemistry owes much to a dream that Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz had. Chemists were confounded by the molecular structure of benzene, until Kekulé had a dream in which he saw the molecule as a dancing string of atoms that circled on itself, like a snake biting its own tail. With that, he discovered the six-carbon benzene ring.

Albert Einstein once connected a boyhood dream of sledding under the stars to his later theory of relativity. And Otto Loewi, a winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine, thanked an Easter dream for the revelation of a new experimental design to prove the chemical, rather than electrical, transmission of nerve impulses. He woke briefly to jot the dream down but could not read his scribbles in the morning. Luckily, he had the same dream again the following night.

Inventors
Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, was having a technical problem with his design, when he dreamed he was taken captive by cannibals who jabbed at him with spears. The spears, however, had something strange about them—a hole in the point. Moving the eye of the needle to its point was the solution Howe had been looking for.

Madam C.J. Walker was the highly successful founder of an African American haircare and cosmetics company that made her the first female self-made millionaire in America and a renowned philanthropist. She told reporters that a large black man gave her the recipe for the hair tonic that saved her own thinning hair—and eventually that of her customers—in a dream.

[1] [2] 下一页