Revelation in Our Dreams

A 'feeling of knowing' sometimes accompanies an aspect of a dream that is carried over into wakefulness (for instance, the certainty that I could fly when I had my flying dream). This feeling is familiar to heavy drinkers - in vino Veritas - inspiring William James's (1896) comment: 'Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes.' This phenomenon is also well known to people who take nitrous oxide or mescaline (McKellar, 1957). A revelation experienced by William James when taking nitrous oxide took the form of doggerel, which he genuinely believed to be of enormous significance while he was under the influence of the drug:

Higamous hogamous, women are monogamous, Hogamous higamous, men are polygamous. (James, 1896)

A curious example of the converse situation, in which an accurate perception arises but the subject cannot acknowledge its veracity, is found in patients suffering from Capgras' Syndrome. This syndrome consists of the delusion that familiar people have been replaced by imposters. Ellis and Young (1990) have sought neuropsychological explanations for this syndrome, as well as for other disorders of face recognition. They suggest that, normally, there is more than one route to the recognition of faces, and that emotional recognition, mediated by different but parallel neurological pathways, and may have to take place at the same time for a normal feeling of knowing. That is, our normal experience of recognition involves the integration of at least two sources of analysis. Patients suffering from Capgras' syndrome have an intact intellectual route for recognition, but a damaged emotional one. Patients suffering from a related condition of being unable to identify faces of people very familiar to them (prosopagnosia) are presumed to have the reverse form of damage. Possibly the same pathways, permanently damaged in these unfortunates, also fail to be coordinated during sleep, and the feeling of knowing becomes all too easily invoked by less than adequate intellectual perceptions.

There are a few instances when genuinely creative thinking has been documented as taking place during dreams. Most popular books on dreaming include Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring and Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' as examples.

Inspiration without effort is an attractive idea. The psychedelic movement of the 1960s promised increased understanding with the use of drugs. The Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century also celebrated personal revelation and inspirational creation, and opium, like cannabis in the 1960s, was a fashionable drug (freely available over the counter in all sorts of remedies). Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been reading Purchas's His Pilgrimage after taking some opium:

In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure.

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Almost twenty years after the incident, Coleridge was persuaded by Byron to publish 'Kubla Khan'. At that time, he made the sensational claim that he had been able to remember 200 to 300 lines of perfect poetry when he had awoken from a drug-induced sleep, and had been busy writing them down when he had been interrupted by somebody from Porlock insisting on seeing him on business, and that when the visitor had left an hour later he had been able to remember nothing of the rest - hence the incomplete nature of the 54 lines of verse with which we are left. Some literary critics (Lefebure, 1974; Schneider, 1975) suggest that this account is probably a gross exaggeration - that is, while Coleridge may have dreamt about Kubla Khan, the poem had not been provided in the dream in its complete form, but had required years of revision. All the evidence seems to indicate that the account of the dream grew in the interval, in accordance with the Romantic ideal of the autonomy of the creative process. As William Empson (1964) comments, 'I find it a completely achieved poem; probably Coleridge was lying when he told the story of the person from Porlock, nearly twenty years later*. Coleridge's other drug-induced efforts are sheer doggerel in comparison, and like many drug addicts he was famous for frequently taking great liberties with the truth - especially where his drug habit was involved.

The other frequently cited example of creation during a dream is that of F. A. Kekule, a nineteenth-century chemist. It was known that each molecule of benzene consisted of six atoms each of carbon and hydrogen, and Kekule attempted to construct a model of the molecule. Because of the valences of these two elements there was no obvious way that the twelve atoms could be arranged into a conventional chain, and he wrestled with the problem for some years. One evening he was dozing in front of a fire when he had a hypnologic vision:

this time the smaller groups [of atoms] kept modesty in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes ... I awoke as if struck by lightning; this time again I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences.

Arranging the carbon atoms in a ring, or hexagon, satisfied the laws of valence, since each of them could share a double bond with one of its neighbors and a single bond with the other, leaving the final one to attach to the I hydrogen atoms arranged around the outside. This insight opened up the whole world of aromatic organic chemistry. (This account of creative inspiration during dreaming has been the subject of some controversy, of which Strunz 1993) has provided a carefully researched historical account.) A less well known example is that of H. V. Hilprecht, an archeologist at Pennsylvania University. In 1893 Hilprecht was given drawings of fragments of agate excavated from the Babylonian temple of Bal at Nippur. He thought they might be finger rings, but was not sure. In a dream, a tall thin priest informed him that the two pieces had come from the same votive cylinder and had been cut in two to make earrings for a statue of the god Ninib. Later in the year he visited the museum in Istanbul where the fragments were kept and demonstrated their exact fit.

These two examples of successful problem solving when dozing or dreaming are typical only in that they were accompanied by a feeling of certainty - what is unusual is that they were realistic solutions. Just how often is inspiration I misguided? Arthur Koestler (1966) comments:

every original thinker who relies, as he must, on his unconscious hunches, incurs much greater risks to his career and sanity than his more pedestrian colleagues. 'The world little knows', wrote Faraday, 'how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized'. Darwin, Huxley, and Planck, among many others, made similar confessions; Einstein lost 'two years of hard work' owing to a false inspiration. 'The imagination', wrote Beveridge, 'merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by the dim light of the knowledge that we carry, we may glimpse something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of ail hope and inspiration but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.'

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As with all creative activity, the final synthesis of ideas represents the endpoint of a great deal of thinking, of preoccupation with some problem. A nineteenth-century physiologist, physicist and psychologist, von Helmholtz, who contributed substantially to every discipline he engaged in, described the process thus:

It was always necessary, first of all, that I should have turned my problem over on all sides to such an extent that I had all its angles and complexities 'in my head' and could run through them freely without writing ... To bring the matter to that point is usually impossible without long preliminary labor. (Quoted in McKellar, 1957)

While Helmholtz did not report solving problems in dreams, apparently he did rely to some extent on autonomous process, so that once he had done the groundwork on a problem he sometimes achieved his insights spontaneously, for instance, when out walking. The role of dreaming in this very important process must be regarded as slight. The 'feeling of knowing' offered either when drunk, drugged, drowsy or asleep is no reliable indication of having achieved a real solution to a problem: unfortunately there are no short cuts in that direction.