Creativity Now, 2nd Edition

Record your night dreams

THE PRINCIPLE

Your dreams are a great source of creative ideas

There’s a long list of inventors, writers and others who have had breakthrough ideas in their night dreams:

• Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was inspired by a dream.
• Scientist Friedrich Kekule dreamed the unusual structure of the Benzine molecule.
• Elias Howe dreamed how to change the design of his invention, the sewing machine, so it worked correctly.
• Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the plot of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
• The tune for ‘Yesterday’ came to Paul McCartney in a dream.

No wonder Stevenson said that dreams occur in ‘that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long’.

Of course, the vast majority of dreams don’t include ...