Famous Ideas That Came From Dreams

Some people have to exercise religiously, carry a journal, and keep track of their every ridiculous thought in order to occasionally extricate a couple of creative ideas. And some other people get to fall asleep and have a spectacular idea come to them into a dream and make them millions of dollars. Because life is fair.

There are a few things you just don’t get the chance to say in life. No matter what type of unimpeachable logic you are using, you will never say that not every idea Hitler had was bad, or that the Aztecs were not completely insensitive to all children just because they used to sacrifice so many of them. No sir. Evil is as evil does, and evil does as evil is.

If you can get over that sudden influx of jealousy, take a look at this list of famous ideas that were borne from dreams. Who knows? Maybe your next flash of genius is only a sleep away.

Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher

Okay, maybe you don’t need to be too jealous of this one since the dreams that preceded the book came while Stephen King was recovering from nearly being killed when he was run over by a van. He had recurring dreams about four men in a cabin who find a mysterious and increasingly-worrying stranger wandering in the woods during a blizzard. The rest of the plot comes courtesy of King’s bizarre but genius waking mind.

Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory

Dali was always quick to give credit for the creative ideas that inspired his surrealist paintings to his surrealist dreams, but The Persistence of Memory is perhaps his most famous dream-inspired artwork. While critics were quick to theorize that The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks, symbolized Einstein’s theory of relativity, Dali shot back that it was inspired by the image of Camembert cheese melting in the sun. In truth, the image of soft, melting clocks in a rugged landscape had come to him in a dream.

The Beatles’ Yesterday

It just doesn’t get much easier than this. One morning in 1964, Paul McCartney woke up in his flat with a tune in his head. He headed straight for the piano to put it into chords and then had to ask all of his friends if they’d heard it before since he couldn’t be sure whether or not he’d written it since it came to him in a dream. The legendary song Yesterday has since become one of The Beatles’ major hits, as well as the most-covered song of all time.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Talk about your charmed life. While Mary Shelley was visiting Lord Byron, of all people, in 1816, she had a nightmare about a young, pale student kneeling beside a grotesque monster that had been created by humans and was coming to life. She set out to write a book that would terrify readers as much as the nightmare had terrified her. Mission accomplished, to put it mildly.

Hi, I'm Dudish and I love to write.