THINK ON THESE – Dreams do come true

PHILOSOPHER and naturalist Henry David Thoreau once said, “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”  In one of his writings, he explained: “I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
American president Thomas Jefferson admitted that he like “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”  To which Denson Franklin pointed out: “When you let your dreams die, something dies within you.” 
The New American Desk Encyclopedia considers dreams as “fantasies,” which are usually visual and “experienced during sleep and in certain other situations.”  Until the 19th century, dreams were regarded as supernatural, often prophetic; their possible prophetic nature has been examined by, among others, J.W. Dunne.
According to Dr. Sigmund Freud, dreams have a latent content (the fulfillment of an individual’s particular unconsciousness wish), which is converted by dreamwork into manifest content (the dream as experienced).  In these terms, interpretation reverses the dreamwork process.
Of course, we often hear someone saying that his or her dreams were coming true.  Who are we to contradict them?  But then, somebody once commented: “No dreams come true until you wake up and go to work.”
Fortunately, The Book of Lists scanned the yellow pages of history and came up with a list of people who put their dreams to work.  One of them was British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  History’s most celebrated episode of dream inspiration occurred on an English summer day in 1797, when the young poet dozed off while reading a history book about Kublai Khan.  An opium addict, Coleridge was probably in a pleasantly drugged state when the immortal verses came to him.
Waking up, Coleridge began to write feverishly.  He had reached the fifty-fourth line – one-sixth of the poem as he envisioned it – when the infamous “person on business from Porlock” interrupted him.  An hour later, when his visitor had left, he had forgotten the rest of the poem.
Another case was that of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.  He read entire imaginary books in his sleep and traveled to distant places, but most important, he received visits from what he called his “little people.”  They dictated stories to him, “piece by piece, like a serial,” especially when he needed money.
Sometimes, Stevenson dreamed stories without their help.  According to his wife, Fanny, “In the small hours of one morning, I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis.  Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him.  He said angrily, ‘Why did you wake me?  I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’”  The bogey tale turned out to be the classic, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Here are more cases, as culled from the lists book.  Although his beloved brother Robert died in 1787, English poet and artist William Blake believed that Robert continued to advise him from beyond the grave – in dreams and waking visions.  While William was seeking a less expensive method of engraving his illustrated songs, his brother “appeared to him in a dream and explained the process of copper engraving, an alternative to the ordinary method of intaglio painting.”  The following morning, Mrs. Blake went out with all their money (half a crown) and spent it on the materials needed to conduct the experiment.  The technique was successful, and Blake produced numerous magnificent illustrations using this method.  
In 1921, the night before Easter Sunday, German-American physiologist Otto Loewi awoke from a dream and “jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper.”  In the morning, he couldn’t read his handwriting.  The next night, at 3:00 a.m., the idea returned.  “It was of 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 simple experiment on a frog heart according to nocturnal design,” he recalled.
Dr. Loewi’s experiment proved that it is not nerves but the chemicals they release that directly affect the heart.  This discovery was a breakthrough, which led to his winning the Nobel Prize in 1936.
Speaking of breakthroughs, Professor Hermann V. Hilprecht had one of the most extraordinary dream breakthroughs ever recorded.  In 1893, the German archaeologist was trying to decipher the cuneiform writing on two small fragments of agate, which he thought were Babylonian finger rings found in temple ruins.  The fragments were housed in separate cases in an Istanbul museum, and he was working with facsimiles.
One night, Prof. Hilprecht went to bed around midnight, and dreamed that “a tall, think priest of the old pre-Christian Nippur… led me to a treasure chamber of the temple,” he recalled.  The priest told him that the two stones were not rings but rather a votive cylinder that had been cut into three pieces, two of them serving as earrings for the statue of the god Ninib.  The priest then told Hilprecht to put the pieces together and explained what the inscription would read.  When Hilprecht woke up, he told his wife the dream, examined the fragments, and found it all to be true, including the reference to Ninib.
When he visited the original pieces in Constantinople, they fit together perfectly.  The 3,000-year-old cuneiform tablet the Hilprecht deciphered, if you care to know, came to be known today as the Stone of Nebuchadnezzar.
Finally, here’s the concluding case.  For years, German chemist Fredrich A. Kekule had tried unsuccessfully to find the molecular structure of benzene.  One night, in 1865, he fell asleep in front of the fireplace and dreamed of atoms swirling in long chains.  In his dream “everything was moving in a snake-like and twisting manner,” he recalled.  “Suddenly, what was this?  One of the snakes got hold of its own tail and the whole structure was mockingly twisting in front of my eyes.  As if struck by lightning, I awoke…”
As a result of this “vision,” Kekule realized that the structure of benzene is a closed carbon ring, a discovery that revolutionized modern chemistry.  Announcing his breakthrough at a scientific convention in 1890, Kekule told his colleagues, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then we may perhaps find the truth.”
What a fitting line to end today’s column.