Kevlar
Dreamed 1991 by Floyd Ragsdale
Floyd Ragsdale, an engineer at Du Pont... took the creativity workshop they offered to employees. The workshop included the idea of dreaming solutions to practical problems and outlined the famous examples of Kekulé [the benzine ring] and Howe [the sewing machine]. Teachers encouraged Ragsdale to write down his dreams about work and examine them for potential help with ongoing problems.
At the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Pentagon asked Du Pont to step up production of Kevlar fiber, which was used in troops bulletproof vests. Du Pont turned out large quantities quickly until a machine broke down. This malfunction was costing seven hundred dollars a minute for the company and threatening thousands of soldiers' lives.
Ragsdale was one of many engineers Du Pont assigned to fix the machine. None of them could even locate the problem. Exhausted by the effort, Ragsdale lay down in bed one night, still pondering the problem.
He fell asleep and dreamed he was part of the piece of equipment. He saw springs and hoses and water spraying everywhere. Water ran outside of the machine. He woke up and wrote down simply "hoses, springs."Puzzling over thc notation and the dream, he had a "Eureka!" experience. The hoses must be closing down, he realized, blocking the flow of water and stopping the functioning of the whole machine. And what would keep them open? Coiled springs inside them!
The next morning, Ragsdale sought out his supervisor, identified the problem, and proposed his solution. His supervisor was dubious even without knowing that the source of this insight was a dream. No one had fingered the hoses as the problem.
Only later during the day, in a "try everything" mode , did the team pull off a hose and find that indeed it had collapsed--which couldn't be detected from the outside. The supervisor then allowed Ragsdale to fit the hoses with springs, and the machine was up and running lt the end of the day. That one dream saved Du Pont between three and four million dollars and the U.S. military numerous lives.
EDITOR'S NOTE
I've read various accounts of this dream in different books; this is the most detailed, though other dream-accounts from Barrett have errors, so not every detail may be true. Still, that truly odd detail--the dream-pun on springs--watersources and coiled metal objects--is in every version I've read.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Deirdre Barrett's The Committee of Sleep, 2001, pp.118. Her source: NBC's the Secret World of Dreams, broadcast May 1995. As the Romans said, caveat sofapotator: "Let the viewer beware."
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