In the plane of the impossible

Now, it is no mean feat to dream without falling asleep. At the best of times it takes a little hard work and the right attitude. It’s what prayer and meditation have always been about and the fact that both forms of focussing the mind have survived to our day, and indeed are currently enjoying a revival, testifies to their efficacy.

Scientists, in general however, and mathematicians in particular, have always prided themselves on the fact that they don’t need to resort to such ‘unscientific’ methods in order to transport their minds into other worlds. Over the years they’ve evolved their own means of taking physically impossible jaunts through etheric worlds and, to the chagrin of yogis and mystics, have also managed to get paid for it. But before we look at their techniques it’s good to acknowledge that even the staunchest advocates of the scientific method have to sleep sometimes, and when they do, what they dream about makes for some very interesting assumptions.

One wintry day in 1865, in the clogged with horse-drawn buggies streets of Vienna, a notable German chemist by the name of Friedrich Kekulé, while waiting for his driver to take the buggy out of a traffic-jam, fell into a tired snooze.

He was tired because for the past few months he’d been working on a most vexing problem: that of discovering how exactly the chain of carbon atoms are linked in the benzene molecule.As he snoozed, he dreamt of carbon atoms in the form of dancing snakes, and as he watched (in his dream) their taunting dance, they all joined hands and formed a circle.

The discovery of the cyclical structure of the benzene molecule laid the basis for the foundation of organic chemistry and Kekulé, naturally, received all the credit for it. After all it had been his dream.

His closing words at the convention where he presented his findings were: “Let us learn how to dream gentlemen, and then perhaps we’ll learn to discover the truth!”Shamelessly I’ll use this classic example to hark back to my earlier analogy of the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that’s ran on it. The apparent ability of the mind to provide surprising answers and unexpected insights when to all intents and purposes, the brain has been ‘switched off’, is echoed by the half-joking comments of today’s computer programmers about their software misbehaving when the hardware is switched off.

While these concerns are fairly recent and date only as far back as the construction of fourth-generation computers, it is a fair assumption to make that given slightly different tools with similar functions, people with similar ambitions will largely replicate both each other’s successes and problems.

The brain has been mankind’s oldest tool, bent to the same problem-solving tasks as modern day computers and their attendant programmers. So it should not be surprising when the brain’s ‘software’ is capable of problem-solving even when the ‘wetware’ has been apparently switched off.

Company employees of the software giant Microsoft, humourously refer to inexplicable glitches caused by apparently inert software as ‘gremlins in the machine’. But the ‘gremlins’ as a quick jaunt through the history of magic, which has always had the brain and its function on centerstage, will show, have been there for a very, very long time.