Sledding Near C
Dreamed around 1890-95 by Albert Einstein
I was sledding with my friends at night. I started to slide down the hill but my sled started going faster and faster. I was going so fast that I realized I was approaching the speed of light. I looked up at that point and I saw the stars. They were being refracted into colors I had never seen before. I was filled with a sense of awe. I understood in some way that I was looking at the most important meaning in my life.
DECADES LATER
Looking back near the end of his life, Einstein said, "I knew I had to understand that dream and you could say, and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream."
EDITOR'S NOTE, 2018
This may not be poetic exaggeration. John Briggs has argued (at book length, in Fire in the Crucible) that genius requires more than high intelligence: it's a matter of seeing the world deeply unlike the societal norm; and such differences both get shaped early and manifest early. One of his examples is Einstein.
However, this dream is doubtful. It's all over the Web, but I can't find its print-source; neither Einstein's Autobiographical Sketches, the ten volumes of his Collected Papers (unless I overlooked it as I skimmed), nor any of the dozens of biographies in my local library. If anyone does know where this story came from, please email me!
2023 NOTE
I just finished Gayle Delaney's 1988 reprint of her Living Your Dreams. On page 345 a footnote on Freud abruptly changes subject--to Einstein!
It has often been claimed that Einstein's theory of general relativity was generated by a dream. After having written to several biographers of Einstein, the director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies where he worked, and several physicists and historians of science, I have found no evidence that Einstein ever consciously used his dreams.Delaney doesn't say where she read or heard the claim. Frustrating! Still, this shows the sled-dream anecdote predates the Web. I agree with her that Einstein's supposed comment "my entire scientific career has been a meditation on my dream" doesn't sound much like him, and I too doubt Einstein "ever consciously used his dreams"--he wasn't an introspective man. But a single spontaneous childhood dream inspiring him seems more plausible. And that dream seems quite like the kooky thought experiments in his letters (in one, he imagines a cosmos of solid stone with bubble-worlds in it. What theory of gravity would the locals have?)
I'm still left wondering where this anecdote began. "Near the end of his life" suggests an interview in the late 1950s. But I just don't know.
JAN. 2024 I may have found the print source. Sleep researcher William Dement's 1972 book Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep mentions a study of dreams and creativity in science and art, A. Sonnet's The Twilight Zone of Dreams, 1961. Dement's bibliography, p.135, says TZD "tells many apocryphal stories. It should be read almost as fiction." If I recall right (I don't have Some Must Watch any more) his example of apocryphal stories was the claim that Nils Bohr's model of the atom was inspired by a dream, which Dement says Bohr denied. I haven't found a copy of TZD yet, but the parallels are awfully suggestive.
FEB. 2024
Nope! Such claims apparently predate Sonnet. In Jung Dream Interpretation, Ancient and Modern (2014, reprinting transcripts of seminars held 1936-41!) the Nils Bohr claim surfaces again (p.67, note 26). True or false, these anecdotes are old--from Einstein's & Bohr's time, not ours.
I'm dropping my whiskbroom and trowel. Time to rent a backhoe.
--Chris Wayan
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