Louis Agassiz (1807-1883) was a Swiss-born naturalist, zoologist, geologist, and teacher who emigrated to the US in 1846. He trained and influenced a generation of American zoologists and paleontologists and is one of the founding fathers of the modern American scientific tradition. Later generations have named everything from mountain peaks to deep-sea features in his honor.

While Agassiz was working on his vast work "Poissons Fossiles", a list of all known fossil fish, he came across a specimen mostly hidden inside a stone slab. He was unsure of its structure and therefore hesitant to try extracting it, since the wrong approach could ruin the specimen.

Agassiz reports having a dream three nights in a row in which he saw the fish in perfect original condition. The first two nights -- being unprepared -- he did not record his image. But on the third night, he was ready with pen and paper, and when the fish appeared again in the dream, he drew it in the dark, still half asleep.

The next day, he found that his drawing had remarkably different features from his previous best guess about the fossil's structure. He hurried to his lab and extracted the fossil on the assumption it was shaped as it had been in the dream.

He freed it successfully, for the fossil corresponded exactly to his dream.

Did Agassiz's dream merely extrapolate from the visible parts of the fossil more intelligently than his conscious mind, or had his unconscious noticed additional clues in the slab that his conscious mind had overlooked?

SOURCE

Nikola Tesla on Agassiz in an interview; in "Tesla, The Modern Sorcerer" by Daniel Blair Stewart

EDITOR'S NOTE

This dream-account is brief, but I've included it (and other dream-inspired scientific and technical innovations) to counter a myth I've run across among dream-skeptics. It goes like this:

Dream-thinking just isn't scientific. The only example you ever hear of is Kekulé and the benzene ring, and he didn't really dream that; it was just a daydream on the bus.

Culturally, hard scientists don't talk much about the sources of one's ideas, particularly if those sources have any taint of mysticism. The scientific method theoretically has no problems with hypotheses coming from dreams (or dice, or the Tooth Fairy)--what makes it science is testing, and scientists quite naturally focus on whether hypotheses pan out. Theoretically, at least. But blabbing about dreams won't win you any grants!

In contrast, in the arts there's a distinct cachet to claims like "That song/story/image came to me in a dream; I'm just channeling some mysterious spirit." If anything, it may boost sales and funding.

So this notion that dreams are soft, squishy, inappropriate for science and serious research may be driven by differences in reporting, driven in turn by economics! But don't confuse talk with behavior. I've seen no evidence that intuition and dreams play less of a role in science.

But don't worry. If your department head asks, we haven't had this little chat. You were never here.

--Chris Wayan

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