ABSTRACT
The French Surrealist poet, St. Paul Roux, would hang a sign on his bedroom door before retiring that read: “Poet at work.” A similar belief in nocturnal productivity was expressed by John Steinbeck: “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” A shorter version of this has become the cliché “sleep on it.” None of these “designate” the dream as spokesperson for the committee of sleep. However, most accounts of solving problems or producing creative products during sleep are of hypnogogic imagery. In the most famous and controversial example, the chemist Kekule reported that his Nobel Prize-winning realization of the structure of the benzene molecule as hexagonal rather than straight came after dreaming of a snake grasping its tail in its mouth. Mendeleev described dreaming the periodic table of the elements in its completed form, and the Nobel Prize-winning experiment demonstrating the chemical transmission of nerve impulses to the heart was conceived by Otto Loewi in a dream. Inventions as varied as Elias Howe’s sewing machine needle—with the hole at the pointed end— and Parkinson’s computer-controlled antiaircraft gun have reportedly been conceived in dreams. Jack Nicklaus credited a crucial improvement in his golf game to dreaming of a new way to grasp his club. Blagrove asserted that on principle, none of these anecdotes could be accurate. He argued that dreams, by their very nature, can’t even intend to solve a problem, much less do so: “The place for problem solving is the waking world” (Barrett, 1993a).
