He used this method successfully.
Otto Leowi dreamt of how to prove that nervous impulses were chemical rather than electrical. This led to his Nobel Prize.
Hilprecht had an amazing dream of the connection between two pieces of agate which enabled him to translate an ancient Babylonian inscription.
Elias Howe faced the problem of how to rpoduse an effective sewing machine. The major difficulty was the needle. He dreamt of natives shaking spears with holes in their points. This led to the invention of the Singer sewing machine.
Albert Einstein said that during adolescence he dreamt he was riding a sledge. It went faster and faster until it reached the speed of light. The stars began to change into amazing patterns and colours, dazzling and beautiful. His meditation on that dream throughout the years led to the Theory of Relativity.
Just before his title fight in 1947, Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt he was in the ring with Doyle. 'I hit him with a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me.' Doyle never moved and the crowd were saying 'He's dead, he's dead!' He was so upset by the dream that he asked Adkins, his trainer and promoter, to call off the fight. Adkins told him, 'Dreams don't come true. If they did I'd be a millionaire.' In the eighth round Doyle went down from a left hook to the jaw. He never got up and died the next day.
When the baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, and before it was known he had been murdered, 1,300 people sent 'precognitive' dreams concerning his fate in response to newspaper headlines. Only seven of these dreams included the three vital factors - that he was dead, naked, and in a ditch.
Abraham Lincoln saw his own death in a dream a few days before it happened.
Calpurnia, wife of Julius Caesar, dreamt that her husband was killed in the Senate. He ignored her warning and was stabbed the next day.
A Norwegian fisherman dreamt that a voice told him that a great liner called the TITANIC would sink after colliding with an iceberg, just two days before the incident. He awoke in a sweat and went back to sleep, only to go back to the dream feeling uneasy and felt icy waves crashing around his body.
Charles Dickens got the inspiration for many of his characters, as well as some of his famously intricate plots from dream material.
Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde was based on a dream in which Hyde changed personality by taking a special powder.
Some of Thomas Edison's best inventions came to him in dreams. German chemist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradovitz dreamt of a snake-like arrangement of atoms. It was chasing and eating its own tail, and forming a closed chain. This led him to discover that the atoms of the benzene molecule are arranged in a circle, and not a straight line, as first thought.
I hope some of you found these fascinating as I did! Also, I wouldn't be to surprised if a lot of Leonardo da Vinci's weird ( well not so weird considering he came up with a plane, parachute and submarine way back then!) inventions came to him in dreams either. Another thing about da Vinci was that all his notes were written backwards!
Quotations About Dreams -- Stephen LaBerge
"Dreams are perhaps the most highly personal expressions you have. No one else can tell you what your dreams mean. A therapist, if sensitive and intimately knowledgeable about you, can make some good guesses. But only you can supply the pertinent associations."
-- Patricia L. Garfield
"You don't have to figure out your dreams; they aren't coded messages that need to be deciphered. Your dreams picture your feelings. The way to use your dreams is to feel the pictures. Some of the dream pictures will feel good and some will feel bad. Some will be confused and hard to feel. But all your dream pictures are important because they are all about you and your life; they show you how your life feels."
-- Richard Corriere
"Dreams are real while they last, can we say more of life."
-- Havelock Ellis
"You can practice overcoming your own fears, inhibitions, and phobias within your dreams. You can carry around within yourself your own self-therapy available to you several times each night."
-- Patricia L. Garfield
"Don't slay your dream dragons; make friends with them."
-- Stephen LaBerge
"We know that, although we seem to be individuals, we are actually plural beings. Each of us has a great multitude of distinct personalities coexisting within one body, sharing one psyche. It is these inner personalities that appear to us in our dreams as persons."
-- Robert A. Johnson
"Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality." -- Tarthang Tulku
"The dream's fantastic theater is the place in which the many varied sides of the self show. All figures, events, and even locations appearing in a dream may be aspects of the self, exhibited in a disguised form. And even though other people, sometimes completely unfamiliar, appear and perform in the dream, in the last analysis they all represent aspects of the dreamer."
-- Ilan Kutz
"A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth."
-- Joseph Campbell
"By granting access to the deepest levels of human experience, dreams can contribute to our health and personal development, as well as making us more acutely conscious of what it means to be alive."
-- Anthony Stevens
"Dreams are a dress rehearsal for life"
-- Alfred Adler
"Only the dream can allow us to experience a future alternative as if it were real, and thereby to provide a supremely enlightened motivation to act upon this knowledge."
-- William C. Dement
"The dream is an involuntary kind of poetry."
-- Jean Paul Richter
"The repeated dream is simply evidence that one's basic issues continue to seethe, seeking to be recognized and resolved. Repeated dreams may wear different costumes, but they reenact the same basic play, which is usually a core issue for the dreamer, or some problem that is currently on her/his mind."
-- Ilan Kutz
"[Dreams] do not deceive, they do not lie, they do not distort or disguise... They are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand."
-- Carl Jung