It's happened to all of us. We fall asleep worried about a problem and wake up with the solution. Or we wake up when we fell asleep the night before. So where does that new problem in our sleep that we've spent hours or days or weeks wrestling with during our waking hours? Why does the advice to "sleep on it" really seem to work?

Did you know that Mozart received many of his most glorious compositions through dreams? Or that the theory of glorious compositions through dreams? Or that the theory of relativity came to Albert Einstein in a dream? Dreams inspired everything from Elias Howe's invention of the sewing machine to Thomas Edison's invention of the light bulb. Dmitry Mendeleyev, a brilliant nineteenth-century chemist and physicist, re-created the Periodic Table during his waking hours after it appeared to him it its entirety in a dream. Robert Lewis Stevenson struggled for days over a short story that refused to take shape until a dream transformed it into the classic "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." And if Dr. Jonas Salk had chosen to ignore his dreams, the polio vaccine might have never existed. Lucky guesses? Coincidences? Preconceived solutions that just happened to reveal themselves during the relaxation of sleep? The words "fat chance" leap to mind.

Fortunately, it's not just extraordinary people like those who are given information and answers during the night. For the last thirty or forty years I've been hearing story after story, and had the firsthand wonder myself, in which we "ordinary people" have awakened with more knowledge than we had when we dozed off. My idea of logic dictates that if it didn't come from inside of us, it came from outside of us and each of us is gifted enough, whether we're conscious of it or not, to retrieve that knowledge and put it to use.

There are two ways we receive information and solutions to our problems while we sleep: through telepathy and through astral travel. Both are marvelously helpful God-given blessings, and both come as naturally to us as breathing once our noisy, skeptical, chronically interfering conscious minds are at rest.


Sylvia Browne is without question, "America's #1 Psychic," an internationally known psychic and medium