Sweet Dreams

Sir Ian McKellen, in a recent interview on taking Waiting For Godot on tour, let slip a liking for sudoku puzzles:

Each night, to help me wind down after the play, I sit up in bed playing sudoku. Then when I go to sleep I tend to see all these rows and numbers floating across and down, and if I can only find the missing number then everything will be OK. Which of course it is. In my dreams I am sudoku.

For me, as someone who has also occasionally dreamt about sudoku, this is fascinating: coming from an actor, could this be some form of Method Solving? 'In my dreams I am sudoku.' In our sleep, do we imagine we are the problem in an effort to solve?

Over the centuries, dreams have helped solve many problems. August Kekulé claimed it was a ring (in the shape of the Uroboros) that he saw in a dream that inspired his discovery of the structure of benzene. Otto Loewi won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on chemical transmission of nerve impulses, but he would not have been able to prove any of it were it not for what came to him in a dream. And Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, dreamt of natives holding spears and dancing: the holes near the tips of the spears made him realise what he needed to do to sewing needles to make them work in his machine.

When I've dreamt of sudoku, it's usually been when a problem has confounded me. It might be because I'm tired, distracted or simply not understanding the puzzle, but dreaming has helped me see the problem in a new light and almost always helps me solve it. So maybe for a short time, some nights, I too become sudoku!