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have heard about sleepwalkers who get up in the middle of the night and without waking, with open eyes, without stumbling, reach directly to the kitchen, find the fridge, open it, eat anything to their heart's content, and in the day they are dieting! And the doctor is puzzled and they themselves are puzzled -- "What is the matter? The more I diet the more my weight is going up."
And there are almost ten percent of people capable of somnambulism. They can walk in their sleep, they can do things, and in the morning they will be disturbed: "Who has done this?" And not just ordinary people; there are cases on record of very great geniuses.
Madame Curie, one of the first women ever to receive a Nobel Prize, was struggling for three years to solve a mathematical problem, and was becoming almost hopeless. Every angle, every dimension, every process she tried, but she was not reaching the right conclusion.
Tired one night, working on the same problem, she fell asleep. When she woke up it was almost morning. She had slept three, four hours just on the table, her head on the papers on which she was working to find the conclusion. And she could not believe her eyes: in her own handwriting the conclusion was written. There was no process, but the conclusion was there.
She could not believe it, because she had been working to find this very same conclusion... and all the ways she had tried, she had reached somewhere else but never to this point. And certainly nobody else could do it, because the door was locked, her husband was not at home and the servant did not even understand arithmetic. Looking carefully, she found it was her own handwriting -- not very accurate, because it had been written in sleep.
And then she closed her eyes and tried to remember whether there had been any dream, and she found that she had dreamt that she was working on the problem, had found the conclusion, and she was writing it -- she remembered it. And then she remembered the whole process.
Now, when she was writing the answer she must have been writing with open eyes. She was a somnambulist, and this was a sudden discovery. Then it was found that many times
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