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Otto LoewiEaster weekend, 1921

Otto Loewi's Nobel Prize dream

A pharmacologist dreamed an experiment, lost it, dreamed it again the next night and went straight to his lab. It proved that nerves speak in chemicals.

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The dream

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

Otto Loewi wrote that on the night before Easter Sunday 1921 he woke, turned on the light and scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper, then fell asleep again. In the morning he could not read what he had written, though he knew it was important.

The next night, at about three in the morning, the idea came back: an experiment to test whether nerves pass their signals to the heart by releasing a chemical. This time he got up, went to his laboratory and did the experiment on two frog hearts.

Where the story comes from

The experiment worked. Fluid from a frog heart whose nerve had been stimulated slowed a second heart, showing that the nerve released a substance, later identified as acetylcholine. Loewi shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Henry Dale.

Loewi told the story himself, most fully in an autobiographical sketch published in 1960. He also said that the basic idea of chemical transmission had occurred to him years earlier, in 1903, and had been forgotten.

How it has been read

Research

Loewi's case is often cited as the strongest documented example of a dream contributing to a scientific discovery, because the dreamer himself reported it and the experiment is precisely dated. He framed it as an old idea resurfacing, not as something new from nowhere.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. Have you ever lost a night-time idea because you could not read your own note?
  2. Is there an old idea of yours that keeps coming back?
  3. What would you test if you trusted a dream enough to act on it?

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. Otto Loewi (1960). An autobiographic sketch. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 4(1): 3-25.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: account of the 1921 experiment (reference not yet checked)

  2. Deirdre Barrett (2001). The Committee of Sleep. New York: Crown.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: chapter on science and dreams (reference not yet checked)

    Harvard psychologist on dreams and creative problem solving, with historical examples.

  3. George W. Baylor (2001). What do we really know about Mendeleev's dream of the periodic table? A note on dreams of scientific problem solving. Dreaming 11.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: discussion of Loewi (reference not yet checked)

    Draws on B. M. Kedrov's study of Mendeleev's manuscripts.