Comment on Baylor: A note about dreams of scientific problem solving

Creative problem-solving dreams virtually always occur only after the dream er has done extensive work on the issue awake. Most typically, a person is stuck at one particular step of a multiple phase process and the dream solv es that step, The dream of Dmitri Mendeleev about The Periodic Table of the Elements is no exception. All accounts of this event agree that he'd worke d for years on the Table, produced other drafts, but that he attributed the version he was most satisfied with to a dream, It is less clear whether Ke drov is correct in his reconstruction that it was the reversal of columns v s, rows which the dream provided. Accounts of dreams from contemporary scie ntists and inventors are a richer source for the detail required to general ize about the role of dreams in problem solving.