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Larry PageAround 1996, at Stanford

Larry Page's midnight idea

Google's co-founder says the idea of downloading the whole web came to him when he woke from a vivid dream at 23.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

In his 2009 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Larry Page asked the graduates if they knew what it was like to wake in the middle of the night from a vivid dream, and to lose it by morning if there was no pen by the bed.

He said he had one of those dreams when he was 23. He woke with a thought: what if the whole web could be downloaded, keeping just the links? He grabbed a pen and began writing out the details, to see whether it could really be done.

Where the story comes from

Page was a graduate student at Stanford at the time. The project, analysing the links between pages, grew with Sergey Brin into a way of ranking search results, and then into Google, founded in 1998.

The speech is our only source for the dream, and it was a commencement address built around the theme of following dreams. Page does not describe the dream itself, only the idea he woke with.

How it has been read

Research

Waking in the night with a solution to a problem you have been living with is a well described experience. The NEXTUP model suggests sleep lets the brain test loose associations between memories, which fits an idea that feels sudden but draws on months of work.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. What idea have you woken up with and lost by breakfast?
  2. What problem are you living with right now that might follow you into sleep?
  3. Would you try keeping a notebook by the bed for a week?

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Larry Page (2009). Commencement address, University of Michigan, 2 May 2009.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: passage on the dream at 23 (reference not yet checked)

    Transcript published by Google and by the press.

  2. Antonio Zadra, Robert Stickgold (2021). When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep. New York: W. W. Norton.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: the NEXTUP model (reference not yet checked)

    NEXTUP model: dreaming explores weak, unexpected associations between memories.