To me this 'dream' has the value of a vision. Hissing and spitting before the event, gas which solidifies and forms an image ... I have heard all that before in another connection. Physicists have their world: they live daily and hourly with their formulae, diagrams and plans. Those are visual signals, which accompany them everywhere they go. Dialogues and discussions with colleagues, assistants and students revolve round their physical problems - acoustic signals which are ever present. The stress of their work causes a 'psycho feedback' which they cannot escape. Consequently physicists can only have visions of images from their, working world, like Niels Bohr who had been fixated on the search for 'his' atom model for years. It appeared to him in a vision. We know whence religious enthusiasts draw their
visual and acoustic signals.
In my opinion the physicist's 'dream' was caused by extraterrestrial impulses. They recalled the 'image'
programmed in the unconscious - owing to psycho-feedback the atom model was present. Bohr's brain was trained for this exceptional case! We must liberate ourselves from the absurd idea that visions are a religious privilege. That is only true if we accept religion's claim to exclusiveness. The great men of the intellectual world are not clever enough to make capital out of their visions. They suddenly had an idea ... they suddenly 'saw' the solution of a long-posed question clearly before their eyes ... the unconscious whispered something to them and it was an 'inner voice' which spoke to them. They describe the syndrome of many visions simply as a 'brilliant idea'. What sort of a saint would an ecclesiastical organization have made out of Albert Einstein if he had his brilliant ideas suddenly and by inspiration as one of their sheep!
The great Niels Bohr was not the only scientist who frankly admitted that ideas that changed the world came to him in dreams.
For example, there was the chemist Professor August Kekule' von Stradowitz (1829-1896) - and what would the world be without his flash of genius? - who made vitally important advances in the theoretical bases of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century. Kekule discovered the quadrivalence of carbon and said that the truly revolutionary image of the 'closed-chain' structure of benzene (1865)
had appeared to him suddenly as if in a dream. This visionary image became the basis of what is now the most important basic material for chemical manufacturing.
There was also, to name just one example from our own day, the physiologist and pharmacologist Professor Otto Loewi (1873-1961), who taught at Graz and emigrated to New York. His fields of research were the physiology of the metabolism and the physiology and pharmacology of the vegetative nervous system. Once again we must ask what would have become of mankind without the visionary dream that helped Loewi to become the first man to demonstrate the chemical transference of nervous impulses in the nervous system (previously scholars had assumed that the transference was electrical). In 1936 Otto Loewi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine (for his dream). Just imagine our stress-ridden world without a single tranquillizer or any of the neuropsychological medicaments, and you will realize the epoch-making significance of Loewi's vision. When he
'received' it, he was ready for the impulses which, so I believe, extraterrestrial beings transmit when they think X day has come.
There is one more comment I want to make.
In 1968 I was spellbound and absorbed by The Double Helix, unquestionably a unique book in its description of a scientific discovery that took place gradually. The book was (and is) all the more stimulating because the author, Harvard Professor James D. Watson, and his colleagues Francis H.C.
Crick and Maurice H.F. Wilkins, solved one of the greatest mysteries of life: the make-up of the DNA
molecule which contains all the hereditary information and cell-building plans of a living creature. In
1962 the team received the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
I share the opinion of Nature's critic, who said that if Watson had not already been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine he should have got the prize for literature. What I had read in 1968 left me with the unforgettable impression of having been within an ace of participating in the growth of a discovery myself. Because it all stayed so fresh in my mind, I picked up the book seven years later and read it again when my years of investigation had spurred me on to track down the phenomenon of visions.
Now the sequence of signals that drove the researchers on appeared to me in a new light. Watson related how lightning-like and often phantasmagoric hints at possible solutions kept on cropping up, whether he was playing tennis, flirting or spending a pleasant week-end.
Unannounced and unwanted (because he was amusing himself), a signal relating to the subject of his research would appear in his brain quite unexpectedly, in situations that were worlds apart from his university laboratory .... 'I huddled as close to the chimney as possible and dreamed of several DNA