Dreams Matter

I’m preparing a proposal for a book that I’m writing on children’s dreams hoping to find a publisher. It’s an exercise that forces one to focus on what is important in a concise and succinct way. When I peel back the layers of my book, what it comes down to is this: Dreams Matter. I feel so strongly about this that I’ve trademarked the phrase! And if they matter to us, then why aren’t we teaching this to our children? Do you need some convincing? Here are some examples of people to whom dreams mattered.

• John von Neumann, mathematician, laid the foundation of modern computer studies and wrote theorems in his dreams.

• Rene Descartes had three dreams in one night that he described as revealing to him the basis of a new philosophy (Cartesianism).

• Eight years after he had written and abandoned the first half of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” Richard Bach had a dream in which he finished the story. It picked up exactly where he had left off.

• Directors Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola and John Sayles credit their work to their dreams. Robert Altman’s “Three Women” and Ingmar Bergman’s “Sawdust and Tinsel” and “Cries and Whispers” were all based on dreams.

• In science, organic chemist Friedrich August Kekule, dreamed the process of the formation of the carbon chain, and the circular structure of the benzene ring. Dmitry Mendeleyev created the periodic tables from a dream.

• Father of Neuroscience, Otto Loewi, had a dream that described the design of an experiment he had been seeking. He wrote down the dream and went back to sleep but in the morning he couldn’t read his notes. Fortunately he dreamed the same dream the next night and in 1936, he won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for his successful experiment.

• Elias Howe invented the sewing machine (beating Isaac M. Singer to the patent) and attributed his invention to the recollection of a nightmare where he was about to become “dinner” for some cannibals. When he recalled the images in the dream he realized that there was a hole in the tip of their spears, which told him where the eye of the needle should go.

• Many classical pieces and popular songs have been “downloaded” through a dream, Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” among them.

• Albert Einstein- Nobel Prize winner and one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century recounted a pivotal dream in an interview with Edwin Newman. “I was sledding with my friends at night. I started to slide down the hill but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.”? Years later, Einstein said, “I knew I had to understand that dream and you could say, and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream.

• And finally, Steven Spielberg calls his film company “Dreamworks.”

These are only a few examples in a world history full of dreams. It would be a true statement to say that dreams make the world go ‘round. For these important and creative artists, scientists, “movers and shakers”, dreams certainly mattered. Perhaps it’s time we ask our children, “What did you dream about, last night?”