The night before he met his greatest student Plato, Socrates dreamed he nursed a baby swan who grew...
I was barren. I asked Asklepios, God of Healing, to make me pregnant. Soon I was. And so I stayed--for 3 years, until...
Natalius dreamed that angels whipped him for joining a heretic cult, and woke to find welts on his back...
Facing death the next day in a Roman arena, Perpetua dreams of the spiritual duel behind the physical one...
Gennadius re-dreams a previous dream, prompting him to notice he's dreaming. His guide points out the spiritual implications...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least until that visitor from Porlock barged in...)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
An epic dream on the lifelong effects of unrequited love, compressed into seven stanzas...
A knight falls in love with a fey woman, until her previous victims warn him in a nightmare that she is...
CAUTION: GOTH TO THE MAX
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike. But for three nights he dreamed...
Howe's sewing-machine design didn't work until, one night, warriors stuck him in a soup-pot, jabbing him with needle-sharp spears...
CAUTION: OUCH!
Twain saw a coffin with white and red flowers. Inside lay his brother Henry. A few days later the riverboat Henry worked on exploded...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
Lincoln dreamed his body was lying in state in the White House. A guard said he'd been assassinated. Two weeks later, he was...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-fragments, wasn't so sure...
Emily Dickinson ties up a worm she mistrusts. Bad move! It grows into a talking snake with a score to settle...
Jung (at age three and a half) sees a terrifying god deep underground, and is told "That is the man-eater!"...
Stevenson's dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares to creative allies dreaming whole stories...
The Lord Chancelor can't sleep, and when at last he does, he drifts through nightmares full of baby lawyers and potted tradesmen sprouting fruit, and cutthroat corporate scheming. But that's Victorian dreaming!
Sledding at night, I approached the speed of light, and the stars turned colors I'd never seen...
Rousseau's famous painting of a woman who falls asleep on a sofa and finds herself in a glorious jungle may just be a real dream...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLACKING
Jung was told in dreams and visions that Europe would soon drown in blood. But he just couldn't believe it...
Lanyi dreamed in detail of the assassination of his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand hours before it happened...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn’t prove it, until one night...
Parkinson dreamed his new telephone device got added to an anti-aircraft gun. He told his dream; guns with M9 units turned out to be so accurate it gave the British hope against the Luftwaffe...
Millay dreams her lover’s attacked in the street, and wakes to realize it’s already happened; he’s lost.
Millay, suffering from nightmares, decides to speak from Nightmare's point of view...
I slay the beautiful dragon attacking us, despite my regret. And then, as I sleep, glowing eyes advance on our keep AGAIN...
The world is a whirlpool, a black and white spiral pulling me down toward a black hole, and it's laughing...
I'm a flightless bird hopping down a line of marble columns rising from the sea, as they topple behind me...
My first memory is of being a wild horse and waking up to find I was suddenly a human child...
My eighth grade class is a flock of birds migrating south for the winter, but we don't migrate the easy way...
This was my first sculpture. I was around four. The rest of the preschool class made bunnies and snowmen. But I'd been peeking at Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore in my mom's art books, so...