Dreams and twilight states of consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators of human possibility throughout history. Here are some examples:

• Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
• Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
• Tartini dreamed a famous violin sonata.
• Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
• William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
• Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.
• Lucille Ball was inspired to launch her phenomenally successful TV show by a dream in which she was visited by a departed friend, the actress Carole Lombard (who had been killed in a plane crash in 1942). Later Lucy’s departed mother appeared in dreams to give her business guidance.
• Jack Nicklaus dreamed up a new golf grip.
• Polynesian master navigators were able to cross thousands of miles of ocean, without maps or instruments, because they followed courses shown to them in dreams. A priest (and royal tattooist) called Hau Maka dreamed the way toEaster Island, describing the location in great detail. His king and his people trusted the dreamer’s travel report. They all set sail with everything they had and after two months sailed into Anakena Bay, which was exactly as Hau Maka had described.
• In his speech on acceptance of his Nobel Prize, quantum physicist Niels Bohr attributed his discoveries to his dreams. Another Nobel laureate and quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.”
• Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped 300 slaves escape to freedom by leading them along the roads she discovered and scouted in her dreams.
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, told a commencement audience at his alma mater that the idea that put him en route to creating the search engine that became a financial behemoth came to him in a dream, counseling, “If you have a big dream, grab it.”
• The biggest gusher in the history of oil, at the time of its discovery in 1938, was the direct result of the dream of a retired British colonial official. It was the origin of Kuwait’s oil wealth, the source of the fuel that got American shipping across the Atlantic in World War II – and of the later Gulf War.
• Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among scores of popular musicians whose songs have been directly inspired by dreams.