Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgh | Hacker News Reader

Reading this reminds me of something that others must have experienced: dreaming in my current work programming language. Code will be scrolling by and I'll be trying and usually failing to express some emotion or day to day topic in code. Sort of frustrating, especially when the language is C++ for some reason.

View on HN

A few months back I was sleeping with a stomach ache. I remember that I was attempting to remove any references to my pain so it would be garbage collected. It made a lot of sense at the time, and it actually worked!

I think there is a zen lesson in here somewhere about attachment...

OMG, something similar to this has happened to me twice over the last few years! I came down with a real bad case of, I don't know, something; but I had a bad fever and was just in a dazed state of half-sleep. The last time I just remember that "I" kept trying to parse some XML and was getting some parsing exceptions. It was so weird the next day remembering back, it was literally like I was in a different state, not really myself. very strange.

This has absolutely happened to me too.

Similar thing happened with me too. In that dream, code was scrolling by, fast. Then it stopped abruptly, and one line grabbed my whole mental focus. And it was a bug! Next day I checked the application I was working at that time, and indeed it was there. Probably I have noticed it before, just forget about it.

I'm should be more amazed at how I can wake up with a bugfix to make in the middle of 1500 LOC from the day or days before. It's something of a once-or-twice-the-month event, and tends to pass by without me paying much attention.

Heh ! one of my juniors (and room-mate) in college was once utterly and totally distraught in his sleep one night. On further questioning he revealed that he dreamt a murder happening outside of a block of an infinite while loop. He was stuck inside the while loop and powerless to do anything about it. He apparently was the instruction pointer.

I do have dreams about code, but no scrolling text, usually nailing details of a function down.

I've had several dreams where I've been trying to code the world around me. Sometimes this involves seeing scrolling source code, other times it seems to be an abstract relationship of programs to the environment I'm in. I usually can't remember very much of these dreams, because when I wake they don't readily make sense and so flee quickly.

I remember waking up whilst learning about animation and thinking that I couldn't move because I had set up the world, view, projection matrices but not the model matrices for my legs and arms.

Sounds like sleep paralysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Interesting how your brain seemed to reason it.

I often want to Command-F various stacks of papers and things in my apartment.

I've tried to "grep" a physical book more than once.

Me too.

(And (dreaming (in Lisp)) is (really weird).)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com