German scientist Kekule was puzzled by the question of how the atomic components of benzene are combined. One day in the winter of 1864, Kekule sat in front of the fireplace and took a nap. Atoms and molecules began to dance in a hallucination. A chain of carbon atoms bit its own tail like a snake and spun before his eyes. After a sudden awakening, Kekulé understood that the benzene molecule is a ring, and the atoms of benzene are arranged in a cyclic arrangement end to end, which is the hexagonal circle that is now full of our organic chemistry textbooks.
In 1921, Roy, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Graz in Austria, woke up the night before Easter with an excellent idea floating in his mind. He immediately took a pen and paper and simply wrote it down. When he woke up the next morning, he knew that inspiration had occurred last night, but what shocked him was that he could not clearly see the notes he had made. He sat in the laboratory for a whole day, facing familiar instruments, and could not recall the idea. By the time I went to bed at night, I still had nothing. But at night, he woke up from his dream again and had the same epiphany. He was so happy that he took careful notes before going back to sleep. The next day, he walked into the laboratory and killed two frogs to prove the chemical mediator effect of nerve impulses. In this way, the chemical transmission of nerve impulses was discovered.
The Russian chemist Mendeleev studied and thought for a long time in order to explore the laws between chemical elements, but did not make a breakthrough. He had thought everything through, but he just couldn't figure out the periodic table. For this reason, he sat at his desk for three consecutive days and nights, thinking hard, trying to make his results into a periodic table, but failed. Probably because he was tired, he fell down next to his desk and fell asleep. Unexpectedly, in sleep, all the elements are arranged according to their proper positions. When he woke up, Mendeleev immediately wrote down the periodic table he had obtained in his dream on a small piece of paper. Later, he discovered that only one part of the periodic table needed to be corrected. He said wittily: "Let's dream with problems that need to be solved."
Einstein took a nap almost every day. When he couldn't figure out a problem, he would fall asleep under the covers and let the "master" in his dream guide him and find the answer. Before he published the special theory of relativity in 1905, he spent many years thinking and researching, but he couldn't figure out several key points. One day, he lay in bed and fell asleep with a feeling of despair. Suddenly there seemed to be a flash of light in front of his eyes. He woke up suddenly and immediately started writing to expand on the thoughts triggered by the flash of light. A few weeks later, the great idea that changed mankind was finally born.
--The above can be found in ""Dreams" Can Come True"~