Paul McCartney Finds "Yesterday" In a Dream
Paul McCartney is one of the most famous singer/ songwriters of all time. According to the Guinness Book of Records, his Beatles song "Yesterday" (1965) has the most cover versions of any song ever written and, according to record label BMI, was performed over seven million times in the 20th century. The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream... The Beatles were in London in 1965 filming Help! and McCartney was staying in a small attic room of his family's house on Wimpole Street. One morning, in a dream he heard a classical string ensemble playing, and, as McCartney tells it: "I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!"
Sources: Paul McCartney -- Many Years From Now 
The Committee of Sleep
Wikipedia |
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Inspired By a Dream
In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves. Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein. "When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think... I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world. ...I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. ...I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story -- my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night! Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke upon me. 'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted me my midnight pillow.' On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, 'It was on a dreary night of November', making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream." Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein
|
Dream Leads to Nobel Prize Otto Loewi (1873-1961), a German born physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. In 1903, Loewi had the idea that there might be a chemical transmission of the nervous impulse rather than an electrical one, which was the common held belief, but he was at a loss on how to prove it. He let the idea slip to the back of his mind until 17 years later he had the following dream. According to Loewi:
"The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3 o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog's heart according to the nocturnal design." It took Loewi a decade to carry out a decisive series of tests to satisfy his critics, but ultimately the result of his initial dream induced experiment became the foundation for the theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse and led to a Nobel Prize! Dr. Loewi noted: "Most so called 'intuitive' discoveries are such associations made in the subconscious." Sources: The War of the Soups and the Sparks:
Otto Loewi, "An Autobiographical Sketch", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Autumn, 1960 |
Abraham Lincoln Dreamt of His Assassination President Abraham Lincoln recounted the following dream to his wife just a few days prior to his assassination: "About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers "The President" was his answer; "he was killed by an assassin!" Then came a loud burst of grief form the crowd, which awoke me from my dream." Lincoln ascribed powerful meanings to his dreams. One of his recurring dreams in particular he considered foretelling and a sign of major events soon to occur. He had this dream the night before his assassination. On the morning of that lamentable day, President Lincoln was discussing matters of the war with General Grant during a cabinet meeting and believed that big news from General Sherman on the front would soon arrive. When Grant asked why he thought so, Lincoln responded: "I had a dream last night; and ever since this war began I have had the same dream just before every event of great national importance. It portends some important event that will happen very soon." His friend and law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, noted that Byron's "The Dream" was one of Lincoln's favorite poems and he often heard him repeat the following lines: Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off waking toils, They do divide our being; Source: Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1885
|
| |
| |
| Kekulé in stamp form, celebrating his discovery of the Benzene structure... attributed to a dream! | |
Madame C.J. Walker - From Dream to Millionaire Madame C.J. Walker (1867-1919) is cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the first female American self-made millionaire. She was also the first member of her family born free.
Madame Walker founded and built a highly successful African-American cosmetic company that made her a millionaire many times over. Walker was suffering from a scalp infection that caused her to loose most of her hair in the 1890’s. She began experimenting with patented medicines and hair-care products. Then, she had a dream that solved her problems: “He answered my prayer, for one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big, black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up in my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out. I tried it on my friends; it helped them. I made up my mind to begin to sell it.” Walker was an entrepreneur, philanthropist and social activist. She best sums up her rise from a childhood in the poor south to being the head of an international, multi-million dollar corporation in the following quote: "I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground." Sources: On Her Own Ground: the Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
MadamecjWalker.com Wikipedia Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture
|
| |
| An early Howe Sewing Machine. Image from the operators manual. | |
The Strange Dream of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long." Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. And was conceived in a dream as he describes: "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers." His wife related picturesquely how one night Louis cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!" Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books. Sources: A Chapter on Dreams by Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains
Robert Louis Stevenson a Critical Biography V2
The Committee of Sleep
The World of Dreams. R.L Woods, 1947, New York, Random House |
| |
| Jack Nicklaus on the cover Golf Magazine -- January 1964. |
Mathematical Genius & Dreamer- Srinivasa Ramanujan Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. In 1914, he was invited in to Cambridge University by the English mathematician GH Hardy who recognized his unconventional genius. He worked there for five years producing startling results and proved over 3,000 theorems in his lifetime. According to Ramanujan, inspiration and insight for his work many times came to him in his dreams... A Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, would appear and present mathematical formulae which he would verify after waking. Such dreams often repeated themselves and the connection with the dream world as a source for his work was constant throughout his life.
Ramanujan describes one of his dreams of mathematical discovery: "While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..." Source: Ramanujan, the Man and the Mathematician, S. R. Ranganathan, 1967 |
Subliminal Clues From Fossil Perceived In Dream Louis Agassiz (1807-1883) was a Swiss born naturalist, zoologist, geologist, and teacher who emigrated to the US in 1846. He trained and influenced a generation of American zoologists and paleontologists and is one of the founding fathers of the modern American scientific tradition While Agassiz was working on his vast work "Poissons Fossiles" a list of all know fossil fish, he came across a specimen in a stone slab which he was, at first, unable to figure out. He hesitated to classify it and extract it since an incorrect approach could ruin the specimen. At that time, Agassiz reports having a dream three nights in a row in which he saw the fish in perfect original condition. The first two nights -- being unprepared -- he did not record his image.
Agassiz' creative dream of the fossilized fish may have been induced by having perceived unconsciously a clue in the stone slab which he had ignored while awake. His dream may have emphasized and drawn his attention to stimuli he had perceived subliminally while he was awake! Source: Interview with Nikola Tesla, speaking of Agassiz, Tesla, The Modern Sorcerer
|
Dreams and The King of Horror
Novelist Stephen King describes how dreams affect his writings in an interview with UK reporter Stan Nicholls: Nicholls: "If the inspiration for Misery didn't come from a real-life incident, where did it come from?" King: "Like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in a dream. In fact, it happened when I was on Concord, flying over here, to Brown's. I fell asleep on the plane, and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer's skin. I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course, the plot changed quite a bit in the telling. But I wrote the first forty or fifty pages right on the landing here, between the ground floor and the first floor of the hotel." "Another time, when I got road-blocked in my novel It, I had a dream about leeches inside discarded refrigerators. I immediately woke up and thought, 'That is where this is supposed to go.' Dreams are just another part of life. To me, it's like seeing something on the street you can use in your fiction. You take it and plug it right in. Writers are scavengers by nature." Nicholls comments: "This could explain the line in Bag of Bones that goes, Perhaps in dreams everyone is a novelist." During an interview with Naomi Epel for her book Writers Dreaming, King described his use of dreams this way: "I've always used dreams the way you'd use mirrors to look at something you couldn't see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back. To me that's what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people's minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language." [Anne Rice, another leading horror writer, also noted she uses dreams -- both fortuitous ones and those more intentionally provided for her books.] Sources: Interview with Stan Nicholls, SFX Magazine no 45; December 1998 Writers Dreaming
The Committee of Sleep
|
Good to have you back, @sentientsixpence!
Well, actually muir is partly right in this instance.
The entire drug industry is somewhat united behind the scenes. The vast majority of pharmaceutical research and drugs are actually developed by government funded university laboratories. The drug companies, like Johnson & Johnson or Pfzier, don't really come in until later, when they purchase the medication at its semi-final stage and carry out their own trials and introduce a molecule or two for the sole purpose of being able to purchase a patent, along with the exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute the drug.
Now, do I think that just because the government funds these labs means that there is some nefarious purpose? No, not really. The potential for fucking with the minds of the public is there, I suppose, but I can't make heads or tails of the arguments as to why they'd do this in such complicated, round-about manner (and please, muir, this is not an invitation for you to post articles with your personal theories).
So, yes, in a sense I agree with the general idea that there definitely something stinky with Big Pharma... but for a provable and profit-oriented reason.
It boils down to those gilt-edged patents that they're scrambling for and the fact that the government seems largely compliant in this. On one hand, governments are usually the first to acknowledge that people around the world need life-saving medicine, but on the other, they will viciously persecute people for attempting to step around the pharmaceutical companies and manufacture and distribute affordable medication.
That's dirty, dirty business and this is something that I think we should talk about more. However, the problem always seems to be that these issues get buried under the more, er...'advanced' theories that escalate the issue and make it hard for people to make heads or tails of the situation because instead of just talking about 'pharmaceutical companies' you introduce 'lizard people' and 'cabals' into the equation and it completely undermines all credibility.
If I was a more suspicious-minded person, I'd say this was done purposely by 'them.'
