Thread: I had a mathematical epiphany!

Back when I took some advanced calculus course, I dreampt that I had come up with not only a formula but some sort of break-through theorem or something.. it was long, and complicated, and made perfect sense. It was amazing how clear it was - like I finally understood the meaning of the universe and translated it all into mathematical language.

I woke up and didn't remember a thing. I wonder if in instances similar to these, we really do understand these complex topics. They always say that the conscious mind is like the tip of the iceberg. What if we, subconsciously, have comprehended way more about the world than we realize??

I wrote a song in my non-lucid dream once. I remembered it too The secret is, as you're waking up just keep saying some key phrase of whatever you're thinking.

Yet once I had a dream and in it I had a full understanding of the meaning of life and the answers to the universe. It was very vivid and clear. Then I woke up from a phone call and forgot everything. But yeah it probably was gibberish anyway because as Iamerik said, you can believe anything in a dream.

I once dreamed some game cheats that worked. I couldn't figure out how to enter them, so I just typed them in and it worked.

And I once woke up with a statement in my head saying "The Z-numbers divided by themselves equal a number so large it can only be described as aleph-immense." The first google results for "Z-numbers" says the only one is 0, so that sorta works...

I believe Robert Stevenson had an epiphany while dreaming, and it lead to the book we know as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Wikipedia states:

In the early autumn of 1885 Stevenson's thoughts turned to the idea of the duality of man's nature, and how to incorporate the interplay of good and evil into a story. One night he had a dream, and on wakening had the intuition for two or three scenes that would appear in the story. "In the small hours of one morning," says Mrs. Stevenson, "I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily, 'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.' I had awakened him at the first transformation scene."

Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's stepson, remembers, "I don't believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr. Jekyll. I remember the first reading as if it were yesterday. Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days."

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is about 230 pages long. The idea came to him in a dream, and he wrote the first draft in about three days?

What does this mean, fellow Oneironauts?

In real life, I was programming a simple game with 2 circles that would bounce off of each other. It was simple but I needed a way to test a way to test if the circles were touching. At first I thought I would just check every pixel to see if it was touching any edge pixels on the other circle. I realized how rediculous this was so I stoped coding it for the day.

That night in a non-lucid dream I was talking to someone about my problem with it and they said to me, "Why don't you just do the distance formula between the circles?" I woke up immediately after that and it worked out perfectly. Take the distance between the center of the circle and if it's less than or equal to the radius of the first plus the radius of the second, they are touching. It was awesome.

If you understood that good for you. Basically what I'm trying to say is, I solved a problem that was bugging me all day in a dream and it was by far the best possible solution.

Originally Posted by Rainman

The secret is, as you're waking up just keep saying some key phrase of whatever you're thinking.

Thats a good idea about repeating some key phrase.


You never know about some of the ideas that may come to us. Some profoundly simple, some jibberish. Although most calculus looks jibberish to me.