According to Ward Hill Lamon a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln dreamed of his own assassination shortly before his death. As Lamon described, Lincoln dreamed of hearing people sobbing. In his dream he got up and wandered through the house trying to find out where that grief came from. He finally reached a room full of armed guards where a funeral was taking place. He asked what was going on and one of the guards answered that the president had been assassinated. Lincoln recounted that he woke up upon hearing a loud "burst of grief" from the crowd.

David Parkinson and the Potentiometer

David Parkinson was working as an engineer at Bell Laboratories in the 40’s, before World War II. He had developed a potentiometer which worked with telephones. He followed the news of the war in Europe and started having dreams about it. One night he dreamt that he was next to the Allied gunners manning the anti-aircraft guns. He saw that his potentiometer was an integral part of the guns. When he woke up, he realized that the recording accuracy of the potentiometer could easily help the anti aircraft guns train on their targets. When the new M9 gun was used on V-1 missiles, it took out 89 or 91 in a single week in August 1944 protecting England.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Kubla Khan

The famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge one day fell asleep in a chair while reading a travel book. He then dreamt the full words for the poem Kubla Khan, with hundreds of lines. Unfortunately, a visitor stopped by and interrupted him. When he later tried to remember what he had dreamt, he could only remember 8 lines and images from which to rebuild the work. Apparently at the moment he fell asleep he was reading the following sentence: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.'

Frederick G Banting - Insulin and Nobel Prize

Dr. Frederick Banting wanted to find a cure for diabetes. The answer came to him in a dream and it won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting's mother had passed away from diabetes so Frederick turned his attention towards a cure. Others had linked diabetes to problems with insulin but could not figure out the full connection and how it worked. After a long time of hard work he still hadn't come up with anything. One night frustrated, he went to sleep pondering the problem. He dreamed of a solution and woke up understanding what experiment would give him the results he needed. The experiment was complete successfully after a few weeks and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery.

St. Patrick Follows His Dreams

St Patrick was born into a wealthy but not particularly religious family. When Patrick was sixteen years old he got imprisoned by Irish renegades who took him to Ireland and held him in captivity for six years. In his isolation he became a devout Christian and dreamed of converting the Irish people to Christianity. He finally managed to escape and according to his writing God spoke to him in a dream. Patrick interpreted the dream as a sign that he was to leave Ireland. After nearly 200 miles of walking Patrick had another dream. This time an angel told him to return to Ireland as a missionary. Patrick took his dream seriously and after fifteen years of study he was ordained as a priest. By this time part of Ireland's population practiced Christianity so the legend that St. Patrick introduced the religion is not completely accurate.

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