In 1996, a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, Larry Page, had a dream in which he had downloaded the entire Web and examined the links between Web pages. He wrote down the dream and it became the basis of an algorithm for a search engine. This was the beginnings of Google, according to Business Insider.
Infallible Sacred Swords of Legend
Swordmaker Chen Shih-Tsung is famous in the Chinese-speaking martial arts world. His swords can split rocks and are extremely flexible—during an interview with Epoch Times in 2009, he easily flexed one 60 degrees.
The art of making these swords was lost when Chen started making swords. The communists had burned books documenting much traditional knowledge during the Cultural Revolution.
He regained what knowledge he could through research, but the secrets of his trade were by and large given to him in dreams and waking visions of celestial beings, he said. He was reticent to describe the brilliant scenes, saying most modern people won’t believe it.
He sits in meditation for an hour before starting a grinding session. He says casting these swords includes an irreplaceable human and spiritual element.
A Gun That Helped Change the Course of World War II
In 1940, David B. Parkinson was working for Bell Telephone laboratories in New Jersey, developing a device for producing musical tones by electrical methods. The device contained a resistance potentiometer, a component that measured the amounts of electrical current.
He had a nightmare in which he was manning an antiaircraft gun and every time he pulled the trigger a Nazi plane crashed. On the side of the gun, he saw a potentiometer.
He thought about it after waking, and realized the potentiometer could be retooled as an electric “brain” for an antiaircraft gun. The dream and subsequent development of the weapon was described in the May 30, 1945 edition of The Milwaukee Journal.
In the first several days the new gun was used, the Germans lost nearly 200 planes. Parkinson won a Presidential award and a Franklin Institute medal.
