Practical Dreamers

I believe you are asking about practical dreamers throughout history, human discoveries, and how they relate to practical life. Dreams have been responsible for some major creative and scientific discoveries in the course of human history. No longer dismissed by psychologists as random neuron firings or meaningless fantasies, dreams are now considered an ongoing thought process that just happens to occur while we are asleep ¹. Here are some examples of practical dreamers throughout history:

- **Mary Shelley**: In early 19th century, Shelley visited Lord Byron by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They were locked in a cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora the year prior, creating Europe's "year without a summer". Stuck indoors and huddled around a log fire, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story - but, night after night, Shelley was unable to think of anything suitable. Then one evening, when discussion turned to the nature of life, Shelley suggested "perhaps a corpse could be re-animated" backed by the thought that "galvanism had given token of such things". Later that night after turning in, her imagination took hold and she experienced what she described as a vivid waking dream: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" ¹.

- **Paul McCartney**: In 1965, Paul McCartney composed the entire melody for the hit acoustic song Yesterday in a dream. It came back to him fully formed when he woke up and he quickly replicated the song on his piano ¹.

- **Otto Loewi**: In 1921, Loewi discovered how nerve impulses were transmitted chemically. He had been struggling with this problem for years until he had a dream that gave him the answer. He woke up and immediately wrote down everything he could remember about his dream ¹.

- **Elias Howe**: In 1845, Howe invented the sewing machine after having a dream about being taken prisoner by a group of natives who were using spears that had holes in their tips. This gave him the idea for a needle with a hole at its pointed end ¹.

As for human discoveries that have dominated 2021, new fossil finds and analysis of ancient DNA preserved in teeth, bones and cave dirt have given us new insights into where we come from and how we evolved ². You can read more about it at ².

I hope this helps!

Source: Conversation with Bing, 9/12/2023

(1) 10 Dreams That Changed Human History - World of Lucid Dreaming. https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/10-dreams-that-changed-the-course-of-human-history.html.

(2) Ancient human discoveries dominated 2021. Here’s what we learned. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/22/world/year-of-ancient-human-discoveries-scn/index.html.

(3) These are the Decade’s Biggest Discoveries in Human Evolution. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural-history/2020/04/28/these-decades-biggest-discoveries-human-evolution/.