Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity has been voted the greatest idea ever inspired by sleep, in an international poll by a leading sleep app.
It topped a dazzling list of such ideas, ahead of the periodic table of elements in second place and the invention of the sewing machine in third – in a survey of by pollsters YouGov on behalf of Calm.com, the meditation and sleep app named Apple’s App of the Year.
Calm commissioned the poll to mark the 200th anniversary in March of Frankenstein, the Gothic novel first published in 1818 after the idea came to its teenage author Mary Shelley in a dream about a corpse brought back to life by electricity.
“So, was Frankenstein the greatest idea ever conceived while asleep?” asks Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of Calm, “Far from it.”
Frankenstein shared just eighth place in the poll with the classic Rolling Stones song, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.
Yesterday, The Beatles song whose tune came to Paul McCartney in his sleep one night in 1964, polled highest of any idea from the arts rather than sciences, ranking fifth overall – one behind the model of atom, devised by the Danish physicist Neils Bohr.
Respondents to Calm’s poll picked from a short-list of 12 great ideas either conceived during sleep or/and inspired by dreams.
“It’s a stunning list”, says Alex Tew, co-founder of Calm. “Sleep is not just vital to health but perhaps the greatest single source of creativity.”
Sixth place went jointly to Terminator, the movie character which first appeared to director James Cameron in a dream, and the principles of analytic geometry, devised by René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician who reputedly slept up to 12 hours a day.
Einstein’s famous theory comfortably topped the poll with 23% of the vote, ahead of the periodic table on 13% and the sewing machine on 10%. No other idea, including Yesterday(5%), polled more than single figures.
Einstein’s journey to the theory of relativity reportedly began with a dream about a field of cows surrounded by an electric fence. But when he told the farmer who he met in the dream what he’d seen and the farmer’s account differed, it gave Einstein the key insight that the same event could look different from different perspectives.
The periodic table of chemical elements, on the other hand, seems to have appeared fully formed to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in his sleep on the night of February 17, 1869. “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required,” he wrote. “Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.”
Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones did not even have to write down the opening verse of the great Stones’ song, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. When he woke in the morning of May 7, 1965, he found that he had unwittingly committed it to a tape recorder during the night.
“Sleep is the only source of invention," the French writer Marcel Proust felt. Winston Churchill agreed that the best time and place to get ideas was when asleep.
The French poet, Saint-Pol-Roux, reputedly hung a sign on his bedroom door before sleep that read, “Le Poète Travaille” (Poet at Work). John Steinbeck, the American author and Nobel laureate wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
This kind of “intelligent information processing that inspires creativity and promotes problem-solving” is a distinct benefit of REM (Rapid Eye-Movement) sleep and the act of dreaming, says Matthew Walker, the Berkeley University sleep scientist, in his book, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams.
“Sleep seems to stimulate your mind to make non-obvious connections,” Walker has said. “It puts all the information from the day into a big biological theatre and forces the mind to speak to people at the back of the theatre, who you may not think you have any connection with. This is the basis of creativity – connecting ideas, events and memories that wouldn’t normally fit together.”
REM-sleep, and the dreaming process associated with it, says Walker, is “informational alchemy”, from which have come some of the most revolutionary leaps forward in human progress."