The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (8 page)

Pauli's dreams coached him on his scientific work, and in dreams he frequently found himself holding discussions with colleagues — especially Einstein and Niels Bohr — that took them beyond their current level of understanding. His dreams also took him into other areas of study, such as philology. He shared with Jung a dream that drove him to study the etymology of the word
window
(which derives from “wind-eye”) and how coincidence came into play in his research, putting him next to a distinguished linguist he had never met before, in a chance encounter on a tram.

Beyond specific discoveries, Pauli's dreams helped him to recognize and pursue a lifelong project that was of even greater importance than his contributions to quantum physics. That project was a unified theory that would explain that there is no separation between psyche and physics at any level of reality. Its nature became clear to him in his midthirties, when he dreamed that Einstein came to him and told him that quantum theory was one-dimensional but reality was two dimensional. In the dream encounter, Pauli realized he must accept a new dimension of reality, the psychospiritual depth of things. “I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time,” Pauli wrote Jung. The driving theme in his later work is the search for the common fundament of mind and matter, and the union of physics and psychology.

Pauli's quest was supported by the rich play of coincidence around him. He was a troubled genius, and his roiling emotions may explain what became known as the Pauli Effect. In Pauli's presence, expensive laboratory equipment had a tendency to break down or blow up. This happened with a cyclotron that had just been installed at Princeton when Pauli arrived on the scene. Pauli came to enjoy his own legend for producing dramatic psychokinetic effects. The play of dreamlike symbols and unlikely conjunctions in his physical life confirmed his “working hypothesis” of “the essential identity of the
mundus archetypus
and physis.”

Let's add four quick scenes from the larger story of dreaming in the history of science, invention, and discovery.

Scene One: Dreaming Up Cryptography

Johannes Trithemius, a medieval abbot of Sponheim, is now regarded, because of the codes contained in his
Stegonagraphia
, as the founder of modern cryptography. Trithemius attributed his career as scholar and cleric to a powerful dream he experienced at fifteen, in which he was shown two tablets — one containing visual images, one written texts — and told to choose between them. He chose the tablet with the writing, and (having been nearilliterate up to this point) became a brilliant and industrious scholar versed in many languages and capable of inventing complex codes and word games. Since he was also a magus, his approach to secret communications went beyond word tricks. He recorded the evocations that could summon spirits to collect messages and transport them to the intended recipients.

The nascent British intelligence service was not slow to see the potential. In 1562, the magus John Dee spent ten days at the Golden Angel tavern in Antwerp, transcribing the complex texts of the German abbot from a borrowed manuscript. He then reported to William Cecil — who was in the process of setting up an intelligence service for Queen Elizabeth I — reporting that he had possession of a key to the “secret sciences.”

Scene Two: Dreaming the First Military Aircraft

J.W. Dunne became celebrated in the 1920s for his
An Experiment with Time
, in which he chronicled a series of precognitive dreams and speculated that there are many — possibly infinite — experiences of time. In his later work, he offered the hypothesis that precognitive dreams may be
caused
by future events.

Dunne was also a soldier, a pilot, and one of the pioneers of military aviation. He designed and built Britain's first military aircraft, a tailless plane with a V-shaped wing, according to principles that are still in use in Stealth technology.

The origin of Dunne 's interest in aircraft design is a fascinating story of how the play of dreams and imagination on a young mind can carry through into remarkable adult achievement. In his early teens, he read Jules Verne 's story, “Clipper of the Clouds,” which described a flying machine that looked very much like a ship, driven by screw propellers and without wings. A few days after reading the story, the boy Dunne dreamed he had invented his own flying machine, very different from Verne 's. In the dream, he was flying among the clouds seated in “a tiny open boat constructed of some whitish material on a wooden framework.” This contraption corresponded to nothing he had ever seen or heard about.

“I never forgot that dream,” Dunne later recalled. He thought about it when he was on sick leave after the Boer War and was assigned by the War Office to work on devising “some heavier than- air contrivance, which should solve the great military problem of reconnaissance.” In 1910, he succeeded in making a test flight of his plane with the V-shaped wing. The pilot sat at the point of the V, in a boat like structure composed of canvas stretched over wooden struts. Sitting in this as he flew over the fields, Dunne had the impression of “traveling through the void in a simple, open canoe” — and realized he was now living out a dream from twenty years before.

Scene Three: Agassiz Dreams the Fish behind the Fossil

When the great zoologist Louis Agassiz was working on a classification of all known fossil fish, he found he could not identify a specimen encased in a stone slab. He could not risk extracting the fossil from the stone for fear of destroying it. Then, three nights in succession he dreamed of seeing the fish in perfect original condition, as it might have been swimming in the sea millions of years ago. He was too dozy to capture his impressions on the first two nights, but on the third night he had pen and paper by the bed and disciplined himself to draw the ancient fish in the dark, when he was still half inside the dream. When he compared his drawing with the specimen, he was certain he had dreamed true.

Scene Four: A Railroad Baron's Brownies

Arthur Stilwell was one of the great financiers and railroad barons of nineteenth-century America. Hemade a fortune and lost it, but his name — as in Stilwell Financial — is still associated with Janus mutual funds and the Kansas City Southern Railroad. However, whether laying railroad track or founding a city in Texas — Port Arthur — Stilwell often took his inspiration from dreams. Today, Port Arthur acknowledges its origins on its official city website with the following statement: “The inspiration for Port Arthur's founding was novel; railroad pioneer Arthur E. Stilwell, who established the town, later wrote that the ideas for his railways and the location of his namesake city came from ‘brownies’ who spoke to him.”

Stilwell himself kept quiet about these things until the end of his business career, concerned that his respectable investors would consider him a “nut” if he revealed that he was laying railroad track according to plans that were being given to him in his dreams. In 1921, Stilwell confessed that he had been visited in his sleep throughout his heyday by guides that (like Robert Louis Stevenson) he called Brownies. In dreams these beings gave him the plans for his railroads, the location and layout of the city of Port Arthur, and the spur to embark on many other business ventures, as well as ideas for books. Stilwell wrote: “There is no doubt in my mind that these messages come from the spirit world, and that this circle of spirits that communicates with me by this rare method is comprised of engineers, poets, and authors.”

There 's that “committee of sleep” that Steinbeck invoked. In any life, we are likely to find it most lively when we are engaged in a creative task that is fresh and risky, especially when that task is all but impossible. Greater challenges draw greater helpers, in and out of the dream worlds.

6. DREAMS ARE A CREATIVE STUDIO

I love kitchen dreams. In my dreams — as often in waking life — the kitchen is a place where good things are mixed together and cooked up. It's the place where my soul, as well as my body, is fed and nourished by a master chef I know to be my inner creator. If my dream kitchen is messy, I pay attention to what I need to sort out in waking life in order to produce something good. If my master chef is unhappy, I jump to take appropriate action. I once cancelled a book contract because I dreamed my master chef — now in the kitchen of an opulent banquet place — did not like my menu and refused to work with it.

To be creative in life does not require us to follow a particular line. You don't need to be a writer, an artist, or a musician to be creative — though you may be in the process of discovering that you are those things, too. To create is to bring something
new
into the world. This requires the willingness to take the risk of going where you have never gone before. To create, you also need to be a “jump thinker,” making connections between things most people would never think to connect, whether this is for a novelty party menu, a way of creating more storage space, or a solution for world poverty.

When we go dreaming, we go into a creative studio where we see the prototypes of creative projects of all kinds that we can bring into our physical lives — if we can learn to hold on to those dreams and act on them before they fade away. Aboriginal artists in northern Australia talk about dreams in which they “walk through” the paintings, interacting with the beings and forms they will later paint. By his own account, the stunningly original architect Frank Gehry does something like this in dreams in which he inspects structures that he later designs. Sometimes, in Gehry's dreams, he gets counsel from interesting people. When he was designing a cancer treatment center in Glasgow, a friend who had died from breast cancer told him in a dream that he needed to make the shapes of the building more feminine to reassure and encourage women patients; Gehry proceeded to work in elements that evoke the delicacy and beauty of lace.

As with the “secret laboratory” of science, a creative engagement with dreams is not just a matter of “Eureka!” moments — like the dream that gave Jack Nicklaus a new golf grip, or the dream that gave Beethoven a canon, or the dream in which Italian mathematician Cardan composed a whole book that he was then able to transcribe. Dreaming gives us a creative studio where we can go anytime we like, and from which we can bring fresh insights and renewed energy for the ever-evolving creative project called life.

Still, those great one-night stands of dream creativity are fabulous, so just for fun let's review a few to show how important they have been.

Dream Music

John Lennon said, “The best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night, and you have to get up and write them down, so you can go back to sleep.” This has been true for many rock musicians. The music for the Rolling Stones hit “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” came to guitarist Keith Richards in a dream in Clearwater, Florida, in 1965. As he stirred from sleep, he grabbed a guitar and turned on a tape recorder so he wouldn't lose the notes he was playing fresh from the dream. He fell back asleep as soon as he had played the notes once, so most of the tape is snoring — but the music remained. Roy Orbison recorded “In Dreams” as soon as he woke from the dream that gave him the song. Pat Monahan, lead singer for Train, woke with a song in his head and immediately recorded a demo of “Drops of Jupiter.” Johnny Cash dreamed the arrangement of “Ring of Fire” — with mariachi horns — and got the idea for “The Man Comes Around” from Queen Elizabeth II (in a dream encounter). Paul McCartney woke up with the music for what became the Beatles hit “Yesterday,” but the lyrics took some work; for days he was wandering around singing “scrambled eggs.”

Bach Teaches a Great Violinist to Dance the Chaconne

Dreams have played a central role in the life of the great contemporary violinist Arnold Steinhardt. The high point of this story, for me, involves an almost unbearably beautiful piece of music.

Bach's Chaconne turns a key in the soul. It gives voice to inconsolable grief. It is achingly lovely; it lays the heart open and frees the spirit, like a bird, to soar on shining wings.

Bach wrote the Chaconne when he returned from a trip with his princely employer to find that his beloved wife, Maria Barbara, had died in his absence and was already buried. He made it the fifth movement of his Partita in D Minor. Less than fifteen minutes in length, the Chaconne is the grail of solo violinists, fiendishly challenging.

Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, was asked to play the Chaconne at the funeral of a dear friend, Petra, who had died tragically young. He had played the Chaconne many times before, and recorded a wonderful rendition, but his grief over the loss of his friend drove him to study again how the music
wanted
to be played. He practiced and practiced, using a facsimile of Bach's original music, listened to the recordings of other great violinists, and consulted friends and mentors.

Then he dreamed he was up in the attic of his friend's house, where he used to practice with the skylight open to give space for the strokes of his bow. In his dream, Petra brought Bach up the stairs to meet him.

Bach was not wearing his flowing wig and was dressed in contemporary clothes, but his identity was immediately clear. What good fortune for me! thought Steinhardt. Here was a golden opportunity to get at the Chaconne 's essence from the master himself.

Steinhardt opened the skylight to play for Bach, but the composer waved the violin away. Steinhardt tried to ask him about the connection between the music and the death of Bach's wife, but instead of responding, Bach seized his arms and began to dance with him in the cramped attic space. Bach danced slowly, gracefully, guiding the violinist through the steps, while humming the rhythm of the Chaconne. He was teaching Steinhardt to
dance
the Chaconne.