Ask HN: Sunday brunch question: Do you dream in code? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Sunday brunch question: Do you dream in code?

10 pointspacaro14 comments

New problems, changing languages, revisiting old code, all of these seem to make me dream in code. I'm curious how prevalent this is.

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I've dreamt in code a few times, but here is my favorite story.

After a long 14 day I drifted off to sleep on the subway. I had a dream in SQL about trying to figure out the best way to set up the moment with a girl I liked so I could go in for a kiss. For some reason, it involved alot of table joins and sub-queries. When I woke up, I realized I had the solution to the de-duplication problem I had been working on all day!

Not regularly, but I've found bugs twice whilst dreaming ... and it's amazing when it happens!

Dream consists of looking through code... then suddenly notice something in my dream-code that isn't quite right and fix it. If I wake up I know it was a dream but am left wondering if it's a bug in real life...

Twice it has been. Brains are weird.

Occasionally, yes. The oddest computer-related dream probably occurred when I was taking a computability course: cars entering and leaving parking spaces in a dream that had to do with the "pumping lemma" for regular languages.

Very rarely, however I do know a developer who dreamed a full day's work where he solved a big problem and was then really confused when all of his hard work didn't exist the next morning.

did it help him arrive at a solution? i've seen a few people who have that experience - the fact that they could have a solution in a dream helped them solve the problem

This is a human behavior with a long, very interesting history. Chemist August Kekule supposedly was trying to sort out the chemical structure of Benzene, dozed off, and dreamt of a snake with his tail in his mouth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#The_ouroboro...

There are many other similar stories of various kinds of technical problems being solved during sleep and/or while dreaming.

I've certainly woken in the middle of the night to write things down. In the cold light of day they're rarely as exceptional as they seem at 2am...

On an abstract level quite often where I have to process things in a certain order and similar problems. It seems to me that this happens when I'm rather overworked

Happen quite often especially when I study something new, I wake up with the voice in my brain that repeats commands like "dot controller" and stuff like that..

I used to dream in code, but now I dream in graphs that represent data structures. This happened when I began focusing on memory layout over syntax and API signatures.

I don't dream in code, but sometimes I think in code. I find myself converting non-tech issues into syntax, and analyzing it for potential 'bug fixes' until I snap out of it and realize how weird that is.

interesting ... was discussing this with another programmer.

I dream in different languages sometimes. It's scary.

I think in code. I have dreamed about code.

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