I WAS FASCINATED BY Deirdre Barrett’s article about dreams begetting inventive insights (“In Dreams Begin Technologies,” Fall 2001). In my 40-plus-year career as a physicist in IBM’s development laboratories, I’ve had the experience numerous times. In fact, I’ve learned to count on it. Not that I go to sleep on any given night expecting solutions to my problems; they just seem to appear on their own. Picking up on the concept of the incubus and succubus in classical literature, I call my nocturnal tutor my “techcubus.”
