When we turn to other scientific fields, we find the curious phenomenon that many of the more celebrated discoveries were inspired by dreams. Kekule dreamed of snakelike atoms, one of which bit its tail, providing the image for the atomic composition of benzene, which he had been searching for. Bohr devised his model for the atom from dream-images of planets whirling around a sun. Frederick Banting won his Nobel Prize by dreaming of the physiological process that causes diabetes. Elias Howe, wondering how to construct a sewing machine, dreamed he was in a mob of savages, whose swords all had holes in their tips and went up and down, up and down.
Arthur Koestler’s own researches into this phenomenon led him to the following conclusion:
“All the biographical evidence indicates that such a radical reshuffling operation as occurs in “creative originality” requires the intervention of mental processes beneath the surface of conscious reasoning, in the twilight zone of awareness. In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational controls are relaxed and the creative person’s mind seems to regress from disciplined thinking to less specialized, more fluid ways of mentation.”
Koestler implicitly assumes the prevalent (although not unchallenged) “conscious/subconscious” model to explain “creative originality.” But if we take conscious reasoning to be thinking in which thoughts are linked together in a series, and if the “twilight zone of awareness” is a twilight zone (cf: “a dreamlike state”) because there is no sense of a self directing the mental processes, then this passage can stand as a description of nondual “prajñā-intuition,” from which the more familiar vijñāna [conceptual] processes derive. This differs from “the subconscious” in that prajñā-intuition can be experienced more consciously, although not self-consciously.
David R. Loy, Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond
