“Through dreaming, we can perceive other worlds, which we can certainly describe, but we can’t describe what makes us perceive them.”—Carlos Castenada
A MELODY IN A DREAM
“I really reckon Yesterday is probably my best song.” This statement is from Paul McCartney, the singer, songwriter, and musician who became famous with The Beatles. His song Yesterday solidified him as one of the most successful creators of all time. It holds the record as the most recorded song in history, with over 1600 versions. In 1980, Paul explained why Yesterday was his favorite song. “I like it not only because it was a big success, but because it was one of the most instinctive songs I’ve ever written.”
Paul wrote Yesterday at 57 Wimpole Street, London. He slept in a cramped attic with only enough room to fit a bed and a piano. He slept there. He created there. These limitations of his creative space embodied the passion and hustle of a brewing creative genius. One night Paul had a dream. In that dream a melody spoke to him. He jumped up out of his sleep and started outpouring what will be later known as the first rendition of Yesterday.
Paul recalled that morning vividly:
“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 like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing. And you have to ask yourself, ‘Where did it come from?’ But you don’t ask yourself too much or it might go away. There are certain times when you get the essence, it’s all there. It’s like an egg being laid, not a crack or flaw in it.”
CREATIVITY AND DREAMS
How did one of the greatest songs of all time magically appear to its composer in a dream? Well, this is not a rare phenomenon for songwriters. Actually, many songs we love and enjoy are based on dreams. When an interviewer asked Eminem how his mind comes up with such complicated rhymes he said, “Oh, I wake up in the morning and they just fall out.” ASAP Rocky also has a similar account as Paul McCartney. When ASAP described how creativity flows through him he said, “I dream and I wake up thinking about designs. I go to sleep sometimes and I think about rhymes, and I wake up and I have to remember it and put it in my phone and then go back to sleep. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and it’s trash. Sometimes it’s great.” The benefit of documenting your dreams doesn’t stop at songwriting.
James Cameron, one of history’s greatest storytellers and filmmakers, is well known for his original stories The Terminator and Avatar. Avatar was a film based on the fantastical world of Pandora, possibly the most realistic depiction of an alien world ever depicted on the big screen. This film transports the audience light years across the galaxy. Every detail was meticulously thought out. The environment and bioluminescent plant life were based on the planetary location in its solar system. Every creature’s biology evolved to fit perfectly, including the local tribe of Na’vi, a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. Avatar was ahead of its time. James’ vision was so realistic that he had to wait ten years after writing the script before filming the movie because the technology needed to make the film hadn’t been invented yet.
Avatar was a success. It raked in over three-billion dollars in the box office. For every successful film, there’s always someone else who claims they had the idea first. Avatar had ten lawsuit claims about the origin of this epic concept. James Cameron won all ten lawsuits with one key piece of evidence—a drawing.
James explained that he first thought of the idea for Avatar in a dream he had as a 19-year-old college student. In a feature for GQ magazine, James said:
“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something. It was all in the dream. I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. So I actually have a drawing. It saved us from about 10 lawsuits. Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were ten or eleven of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was nineteen, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.”
The idea for Avatar started from a dream and was developed over years to become the film we love today. James Cameron knew the power of harnessing his dreams for inspiration from a young age. Actually, Avatar wasn’t the only story he created based on a dream. The Terminator, one of the most classic sci-fi action films of all time, also came to James in a nightmare. He was sick with a fever alone in a foreign city when his dream projected him into two characters from the future who were “out of sync, out of time, out of place.”
A few of the greatest scientific discoveries were inspired by dreams. When Einstein was a child, he had a vivid dream of sledding down a hill approaching the speed of light. This dream was an inspiration for what was to become the Theory of Relativity. The father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, developed the Bohr model of the atom after having an inspirational dream of electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev published the periodic table of chemical elements, which is arranged based on the elements’ atomic and chemical properties. He said, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction seem necessary.” His unconscious mind synthesized and organized the data that his conscious mind had been absorbing while working.