The Science of Dreaming
At their simplest, dreams are part of a natural cycle of the brain during sleep. Most people spend around 100 minutes a night in the dreaming or REM phase of sleep, dipping into this dream sleep perhaps four or five times. Sleeping like a baby
Dreams Inspiring Big Ideas
There is far more to dreaming than sleep cycles. For one thing, dreams are a powerful source of inspiration and ideas from dreams may be found in unlikely places.
Einstein claims his Nobel Prize-winning theory of relativity came from a dream. A row of cows are leaning against an electric fence. Einstein and a farmer are standing at opposite ends of the fence when it is suddenly switched on and the cows leap away. The two men discuss what they have just seen in the dream only to discover they have witnessed oddly different events. When he woke, the memory and strange resonance of the dream stayed with Einstein. He puzzled over it until he realised that the dream was showing him previously unimagined implications of the nature of light and time.
Otto Loewi also pulled of the dream-a-Nobel-Prize trick, after a little persistence. Having devised a theory in the field of Biology, a way to prove it finally came to him in a dream seventeen years later. He immediately wrote it down, but in the morning all he found it was an illegible scrawl! The next night, the dream came again and in the morning he could still recall the design of a simple but ingenious experiment. He rushed to the lab and following the dream, found he did indeed have his proof.
Dreams Inspiring Society
We've looked at sudden moments of inspiration, but dreams also have an all pervading and uncontainable quality. For most people, nothing will hold back dreams. If we don't sleep enough, our dreams begin to slip into our waking experience. Mystics such as Shaman and Medicine Men are often said to live in the waking world and the world of dreams at the same time. Their inspiration may knowingly or otherwise guide the broad patterns of our lives.
Black Elk, was a Native American Medicine Man and a survivor of the massacre at Wounded Knee. He describes his dream as a child: “I was standing on the highest mountain of them all and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the centre grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children.”
The dream and the philosophy that stemmed from it guided Black Elk and thus the Sioux people for many years. That dream finally came to and end at Wounded Knee. Some time later he said: "I did not know then how much was ended. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead"
How Big do you Dream?
Are dreams then a moment at night when our intuition opens up? Or are they in fact something huge, the world and the backdrop that our lives are contained within? In the world we are familiar with, we still understand Martin Luther Kings' "dream" and we look for that defining vision in life.
So next time life lacks that little something, perhaps you should take a look at what you're dreaming….
