From hit songs to scientific breakthroughs, some of the world's most interesting innovations came via a dream.
Here are seven of these world-changing ideas:
1. The Sewing Machine
U.S. inventor Elias Howe patented the first practical sewing machine in 1846. The year before, he had been trying to figure out how to automate the sewing process. One night he fell asleep and dreamt that he was being chased by wild cannibals who caught him and placed him in a huge pot. He kept trying to get out but they kept forcing him back in with spears that had holes at their tips.
That's when Howe got the idea to pass the thread through the point of the needle instead of the end, reported Reader's Digest.
According to Dream Symbolism, the cannibals forcing him back mimicked the action of a needle and his design forced the needle back into the garment each time. The spear with a hole at the tip resembled a modern-day needle as we know it.
2. The Beatles' hit song 'Yesterday'
"Yesterday" is now reportedly one of the most covered songs in history, and it all came to band member Paul McCartney in a dream one night in 1963.
"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th — and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically," McCartney explained in 1980.
3. The Periodic Table
By his mid-thirties, renowned Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was preoccupied with classifying the 56 known elements into a periodic table, but had reportedly struggled to find an underlying principle that would organise them according to sets of similar properties. That's until one night when he envisioned it all in a dream.
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper," he later recounted in his diary. He is now credited as the founder of the periodic law, which explains why the properties of elements in the same group "repeat" periodically.
4. The structure of the atom
In 1922, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist regarded as the father of quantum mechanics, received the Nobel prize for physics for conceiving the model of the atom. He was snoozing away when he had a vision of the planets attached to pieces of string circling the sun. He woke up from this dream and suddenly could envision the movement of electrons, reported calm.com. Ironically, Bohr's model of the atom has since been replaced by more complex versions.
5. 'Twilight'
Stay-at-home mom Stephenie Meyer woke up from a very vivid dream in June of 2003."In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that a) they were falling in love with each other while b) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately," she writes on her website.
From that point on, not one day passed that she did not write something, eventually submitting the story to literary agents and becoming a published author.
Meyer's vampire stories became a sensation among teens and adults alike, hitting bestseller lists and becoming a box-office hit.
6. 'Frankenstein'
This is how author Mary Shelley described the dream that led to her classic story, dubbed the world's first sci-fi novel, in 1816.
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
7. Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Man Who Knew Infinity
The self-taught math prodigy from India, born in 1887, is regarded as one of the greatest mathematical geniuses to ever live, who made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers, elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series, and proved more than 3,000 mathematical theorems in his lifetime. Ramanujan said that the insight for his work came to him in his dreams on many occasions.
Ramanujan also expressed that, throughout his life, he repeatedly dreamed of the Hindu goddess Namakkal. She presented him with complex mathematical formulas over and over, which he could then test and verify upon waking.
There is a now a movie inspired by his life.