dreams
Visions, nocturnal equations, and things seen behind closed eyes.
Fiolxhilde
Johannes Kepler wrote a short story about a witch who sends her son to the Moon; years after the manuscript leaked, his own mother was on trial as a witch.
The Assessor of Heaven
Sweden's chief mining assessor spent thirty years cataloguing iron ore before dining alone in a London tavern, looking up, and being appointed by the Lord to survey heaven.
The Bait Camp Visionary
How does a shrimp seller who couldn't swim, living alone on a sandspit reachable only by boat, end up on Betty Parsons's walls beside Pollock and Rothko?
The Hippopotamus in the Marsh
What does a chess grandmaster do when his brain is hijacked, mid-game, by a children's poem about a stuck hippopotamus?
The Mathematician Who Dreamed in Equations
A goddess wrote equations on his tongue in dreams, and when mathematicians finally checked his work, he was right.