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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

I've had a phenomenon occur to me this week that I've experienced a few times before.

I was stuck on a coding problem for the entire afternoon one day. For whatever reason things weren't clicking and I couldn't solve the problem I had. I went to bed and as I was waking up the next morning, the complete solution came to me.

I wasn't dreaming, but I was in that hazy half-awake half-asleep mode where I'm not consciously thinking about anything.

I've had this happen a few times before where I go to bed stuck on a problem and miraculously wake up with the solution. It's a very strange (but happy) feeling.

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I've had several nights where my dreams are just trying to solve programming problems, but in my experience it always breaks down and ends up useless because logic doesn't make sense in the dream. Everything in the dream is inconsistent and changes from one minute to the next, but some part of my brain is still trying to solve the problem.

The worst is dreaming and using emacs in the dream. I get around the code so fast because at this point it feels like an extension of my own mind, but in a dream state my brain can't make the code on the screen make anywhere close to as much sense and it doesn't react fast enough when I kill a line or jump around looking for a new block of code.

Also, just reading the text itself is alien. Because it's colourful and code-looking, but my mind can't quite get the monospacing right. So outside the direct bit of code I'm looking at, the code gets kinda blurry or wobbly.

> Everything in the dream is inconsistent and changes from one minute to the next

That's something that can be very useful in problem solving. Helps you finding new ideas. The hard thing is grabbing this idea and waking yourself up when you strike gold.

I had one of these when I was in my early twenties. I had been trying to locate a persistent crash that seemed to occur randomly in a modem terminal written in 6502 assembly.

I'd been at this non-stop for weeks, and had been just working and sleeping, poring over and over the code with no clue. As I remember it, one night I was dreaming that the code was slowly scrolling up a screen in front of me, and one line was colored red. I woke up at that point and knew what the problem was. I think I just got dressed and went directly into work rather than try to go back to sleep.

Since then, I've had fresh insights after sleeping on a problem and coming back in the next day, but I've never had another instance of my brain saying "It's right here, you idiot!" to me in a dream.

This happens to me all the time, especially when I get stuck on a programming problem. It's counter-intuitive, but sometimes the best approach is to take a step back and stop actively thinking about it.

If you're more interested in this phenomenon, I recommend reading "A Mind For Numbers" by Barbara Oakley [1].

She calls it "the diffuse mode" and it's useful for spotting similarities and making connections between different concepts and ideas. This is difficult to do in "the focused mode", when you're analytically working on a problem.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-...

Oh yes, I've solved many coding problems by leaving my desk to grab a cup of coffee or get water.

I drank so much coffee in the office. At home it takes longer and I get distracted.

Sounds like you found this trick: https://www.fastcompany.com/3023078/how-dali-einstein-and-ar...

Reminded me of the (possibly untrue/exaggerated) story of the sewing machine needle:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dreams#The_sewing_ma...

Plenty of other great dreams * on that page.

* I know you weren't dreaming exactly, but why let that get in the way? :)

I first experienced that with calculus in high school. I would keep paper and pen on the nightstand to capture middle of the night thoughts. Sometimes it was jibberish, but often enough was a good chunk of a solution. Happened with some complex bugs too, but I’ve not had it happen in a number of years now. Maybe I’m not working on complex enough problems now.

Happens to me all the time, with all kinds of things

I'll grind leetcode and be stuck on a problem and wake up the next day and be able to do the problem.

I'll study new information and wake up the next day and that information is intuitive.

I'll practice guitar for hours and be unable to consistently play a certain riff then wake up the next day and be able to play it effortlessly.

Strange what sleep does.

Happened many times. One time I actually debugged a Perl script in my dream!

happens to me all the time. i'll also often return from a dog walk with several potential solutions to try.

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