dreams that forever changed society

With a fever spiking to 102

Global best selling novelist Stephen King had many ideas come to him through dreams, including the books Misery and It. As King said: Ive always used dreams the way youd use mirrors to look at something you couldnt see head on.

In the early 20th century, scientists thought our nerves transmitted information electrically. After a dream, Dr. Otto Loewi awoke during the night and scribbled some thoughts on a paper. Upon waking in the morning, he realized he had written about information being transmitted chemically, later proven to be true and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1936.

You might not know much about it, but benzene is a pretty important foundation in chemistry, partly responsible for cars, leather, and high schoolers dismay. Chemist Friedrich August Kekul

Dmitry Mendeleev first came up with the idea for the periodic table in a dream. Unable to figure out how to arrange the elements, he used music heard in his dream to figure out the best way was by their properties and atomic weight.

Director Christopher Nolan is fascinated with dreams. He would frequently practice waking up and falling partially asleep again to try manipulating his dreams in the semi conscious state. Its easy to see how this love turned into the Inception thriller.

D.B Parkinson, an employee at Bell Labs (started by Alexander Graham Bell and at one time owned by AT&T) was designing an add on to the telephone in 1940. One night, he dreamt he was in the middle of the war in Europe and, after being shown by an artillery crewman, saw the device he was creating helped the cannon take out Nazi aircraft with surprising accuracy.

Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones attributed his popular song (I Cant Get No) Satisfaction to a dream. Hes said to have recorded the acoustic riffs just before falling back to sleep. (The riffs were followed by 40 minutes of him snoring.)

Beethoven was rumoured to be a prolific dreamer, hearing many of his piano sonatas in his dreams and writing them out afterwards. Some historians even say his dreams featured instruments not yet invented. Wed love to hear his Symphony No. 5on one of those!

Robert Louis Stevenson regularly used dreams as the bases for his stories. He saw the scene where Mr. Hyde changes in front of his pursuers and, combined with other nights of dream, wrote the novel within 10 weeks.