Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (523 page)

unknown potentialities and perhaps of using them usefully and sensibly in future. We are taking our first hesitant steps towards mutual communication.

A few 'initiates' - I am not speaking of religious figures -have always had access to the wonderful unconscious, from which they summoned up great discoveries in visionary form. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who laid down the foundations of atomic theory, has described how he finally hit on the idea of his atomic model after years of vain re-search [26].

Neils Bohr dreamt he was sitting on a sun of burning gas. Hissing, spitting planets rushed by him and they all seemed to be attached to the sun they were circling by fine threads. Suddenly gas, sun and planets contracted and solidified. At this moment, said Niels Bohr, he awoke. He knew at once that what he had seen in his dream was the atom model.

Neils Bohr was canonized for this vision in 1922 - I beg your pardon - awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics!

To me this 'dream' has the value of a vision. Hissing and spitting before the event, gas which solidifies and forms an image ... I have heard all that before in another connection. Physicists have their world: they live daily and hourly with their formulae, diagrams and plans. Those are visual signals, which accompany them everywhere they go. Dialogues and discussions with colleagues, assistants and students revolve round their physical problems - acoustic signals which are ever present. The stress of their work causes a 'psycho feedback' which they cannot escape. Consequently physicists can only have visions of images from their, working world, like Niels Bohr who had been fixated on the search for 'his' atom model for years. It appeared to him in a vision. We know whence religious enthusiasts draw their visual and acoustic signals.

In my opinion the physicist's 'dream' was caused by extraterrestrial impulses. They recalled the 'image'

programmed in the unconscious - owing to psycho-feedback the atom model was present. Bohr's brain was trained for this exceptional case! We must liberate ourselves from the absurd idea that visions are a religious privilege. That is only true if we accept religion's claim to exclusiveness. The great men of the intellectual world are not clever enough to make capital out of their visions. They suddenly had an idea ... they suddenly 'saw' the solution of a long-posed question clearly before their eyes ... the unconscious whispered something to them and it was an 'inner voice' which spoke to them. They describe the syndrome of many visions simply as a 'brilliant idea'. What sort of a saint would an ecclesiastical organization have made out of Albert Einstein if he had his brilliant ideas suddenly and by inspiration as one of their sheep!

The great Niels Bohr was not the only scientist who frankly admitted that ideas that changed the world came to him in dreams.

For example, there was the chemist Professor August Kekule' von Stradowitz (1829-1896) - and what would the world be without his flash of genius? - who made vitally important advances in the theoretical bases of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century. Kekule discovered the quadrivalence of carbon and said that the truly revolutionary image of the 'closed-chain' structure of benzene (1865) had appeared to him suddenly as if in a dream. This visionary image became the basis of what is now the most important basic material for chemical manufacturing.