Famous LDers, for example Dalí, Tesla, Steven King, Richard Feynman...

**StephL** · 11-10-2014 05:24 PM

Yupp - been just stumbling over a list of ten famous LDers, and we have exquisite company indeed:
[Link to site that sells products that we offer here for free was removed. I would think you know by now that it's not allowed. Type up your own article or gather it up from wiki or something. C'moooon.]
I'm a huge Feynman fan - here's the bit about him:

#6 Richard Feynman
The famous American physicist, Richard Feynman, declared his aptitude for lucid dreaming in his national bestseller, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! He dedicated an entire chapter to his experiments with lucid dreaming where he gave a detailed account of how he influenced his dreams:

"I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what the hell did make you think of that! So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.

"I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down, into the sleep itself!

"I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly."

Besides him, they mention further famous physicists Nicola Tesla and Einstein, being unsure about the latter, though.

Unsurprisingly movie directors Wachowski brothers (Matrix), Richard Linklater (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, great movie), Chris Nolan (Inception, Memonto) and James Cameron (Avatar) are on the list as well. Then there's musician Richard D James of Aphex Twin, author Steven King and Salvador Dalí.

Wouldn't it be nice to find more and more people to mention in here?
Go ahead!

**acatalephobic** · 11-10-2014 10:09 PM

There are a lot of the same names in this previous thread, but a few new ones as well.

I for one would be interested to know if H.D. Thoreau was in fact a lucid dreamer...

I found a list of famous works/discoveries/inventions/etc. that were the result of dreams (not necessarily lucid) and although I don't see any sourcing of the material, some of the names on the list include:

Nils Bohr
Elias Howe
Frederick Banting
Otto Loewi
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz
Srinivasa Ramanujan

The article also mentions that Abraham Lincoln dreamt of his assassination and described it to his wife in detail just days before his death. BD material? I'd say so...

**StephL** · 11-11-2014 12:08 AM

The periodic table of the chemical elements has it's background in a dream as well: Dmitri Mendeleev - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary."

—Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev

**ThreeCat** · 11-11-2014 04:47 PM

Sir Thomas Browne, 17th century physician and lucid dreamer:

"...yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests and laugh my self awake at the conceits thereof."

He's often cited, though I don't know of any other quotes by him on lucid dreaming.

**Bobblehat** · 11-11-2014 09:24 PM

I saw a film the other night - so many of the scenes from that reminded me of the appearance of many of my LDs. An eerie slightly cartoon-like quality. And also some recurring themes popped up - slides being one. I wonder if the peopel involved in that were lucid dreamers, or at least people who are interested in dreams.