Читать книгу Understanding Dreams: What they are and how to interpret them - Nerys Dee - Страница 41

One inspirational dream that revolutionised the world was that of Fredrich August von Kekule, a professor of chemistry in Ghent a hundred years ago. He was having difficulty understanding the molecular structure of a certain substance when, one day, he dozed and had a dream. In this he saw atoms gambolling before his eyes. There were smaller groups which kept in the background, and in the foreground, with the acute vision peculiar to dreams, he distinguished larger structures forming strange configurations. These were in long chains, twisting and turning in snake-like fashion. Suddenly, he was astounded to see one ‘snake seize its own tail and mockingly form a circle. On waking it dawned on him that the circle formed by the snake symbolised the missing link in his researches. By transforming this scene into logic, he discovered it represented the ring theory underlying the constitution of benzene. In essence, he had discovered the complex mixture of hydrocarbons underlying the synthesis of petrol from oil.