Thread: I had a mathematical epiphany!

I once made up a great idea for a game modification in a dream. I don't know if it actually was great because your dreams can make you believe anything... Anyway, when I woke up I had forgotten.

You're right about believing anything. That's what is so great about them although wouldn't it be nice to be able to step back in our dream and look at our problem from reality's perspective?

I find it really hard to remember music created in my dreams, but have never tired a formula of sorts.

When I was young I had a dream that the code to Metroid was "Justin Bailey".

Of course I had read this when I was at a friend's house or something and it just came back to me in the dream...but I thought it was so cool that I dreamed about it, then woke up excitedly and tried it, and it worked!

I wish I woulda known about "NARPAS SWORD" back then...

Back on topic, I have had various epiphanies while dreaming but can never really remember any details once I wake up.

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.

Originally Posted by Alex D

I find it really hard to remember music created in my dreams.

Me too. I often find myself composing songs in my dreams, which sound different than anything I did in real life, but very enjoyable. I wasn't ever able to write it down or even put it into a sequencer, unfortunately.

However, when I was working on a megamix, I went into a problem: the drummer was annoyingly inaccurate, and when tweaking the beats to match a drum loop, one verse really got screwed due to it. Nothing I tried would fix it. I decided to fix it in a dream. I came up with laying a guitar from another song, which was in another key and in another tempo, over it. Then, I decided to wake up in order to write down a note. Next day, I did heavy editing that guitar to do just that, and it worked exactly as in the dream. As in making a megamix, the first step is usually sorting candidate songs by bpm, I probably wouldn't have come up with such a fix. I guess, the dream made me able to look at the songs from a different perspective, as I don't have a sense for time there.

i play guitar, but i'm teaching myself so i never really have anyone to teach me. in a lucid someone was teaching me a song and I was trying hard to make myself remember it once i woke up but i couldn't. maybe my subconcious was making up the chords with the sound it made

I think that some things that seem to make perfect sense in dreams, are actually just rubbish. I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I know of several instances where I solved a problem in a dream, but the solution was senseless in real life. It's a bit like when we think we can understand foreign languages in dreams, it makes perfect sense to us at the time, even though it is mostly just gibberish.