“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothing’s coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can’t get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I “see” in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep?

I decided there must be an “interpretation department.” When you are actually looking at something—a man, a lamp, or a wall—you don’t just see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you’re dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating, but it’s all slopped up. It’s telling you that you’re seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn’t true. It’s interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image.

One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn’t believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We’re playing a game on a billiard table with three balls—a white ball, a green ball, and a gray ball—and the name of the game is “titsies.” There was something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can’t get to it.

I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it away, of course-them’s girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what the hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It’s like when you’re trying to remember a name, and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t get it.

It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I don’t know if she wore a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.

I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right—there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, “No, that one was too perfect—too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis.”

The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation

After I finished at MIT I wanted to get a summer job. I had applied two or three times to the Bell Labs, and had gone out a few times to visit. Bill Shockley, who knew me from the lab at MIT, would show me around each time, and I enjoyed those visits terrifically, but I never got a job there.

I had letters from some of my professors to two specific companies. One was to the Bausch and Lomb Company for tracing rays through lenses; the other was to Electrical Testing Labs in New York. At that time nobody knew what a physicist even was, and there weren’t any positions in industry for physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists—nobody knew how to use them. It’s interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact opposite: people wanted physicists everywhere. So I wasn’t getting anywhere as a physicist looking for a job late in the Depression.

About that time I met an old friend of mine on the beach at our home town of Far Rockaway, where we grew up together. We had gone to school together when we were about eleven or twelve, and were very good friends. We were both scientifically minded. He had a “laboratory,” and I had a “laboratory.” We often played together, and discussed things together.