The Story Goes That A Stuck Chemist Dreamed Of A Snake And Saw Benzene Was A Ring
The famous account credits a dream of a snake eating its tail with revealing the ring shape.
Stuff You Should Know · Our Big Fat Dream EpisodeIn Germany in the middle of the 19th century, a chemist named Kekule went to sleep stuck. He had been trained to think that every molecule was arranged in a straight line.
One molecule, benzene, would not cooperate. However he arranged it on paper, the math for a straight line did not add up.
His story usually gets mentioned in lists of problems supposedly solved in dreams.
The method people describe is dream incubation, focusing on one problem as you fall asleep after turning it over during the day, in hopes of dreaming about it.
In the famous telling, that night Kekule dreamed of an Ouroboros, a snake curled around with its tail in its mouth.
The story says he woke knowing that benzene was arranged in a ring, a circle rather than a line, and he was right.
That took completely different thinking from everything he had learned before.
Some who hear the story think the seed of the ring idea was already in his mind, and the dream let him reach it. There is no way to prove that.
Questions people ask
What is benzene, and why did its shape matter so much?
Benzene is a chemical made of six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms, widely used as a starting material for plastics, dyes, and other products. Its atoms form a flat ring, which helps explain why it behaves differently from chain-shaped chemicals. Getting that structure right helped open up modern organic chemistry.
What is an Ouroboros?
The Ouroboros is an ancient image of a snake or dragon curled around to take its own tail in its mouth. It appears in Egyptian, Greek, and later mystical art, and is often read as an emblem of cycles and wholeness.
Can you really train yourself to dream about a problem?
Researchers call the practice dream incubation, and it can improve the odds of dreaming about a chosen topic. It means thinking about one problem during the day, holding it in mind as you fall asleep, and writing down what you remember in the morning. It does not promise a breakthrough, but it raises the chance of a relevant dream.