I had a dream recently where I was guiding a civilisation over multiple thousands of years. Att the end of the dream when they had finally overcome their problems, one of them said to me ‘being a person, when really you’re just a blob of goo, is the most profound thing you could ever do.’
And it hit me so hard. All I am is a bunch of cells held together in a skin bag. And yet I’m a person with feelings and experiences and desires. And I did that, I live it. It makes us all so valuable.
Have your dreams ever had effects on you like that?
Not like that, no. But I had a dream once about a specific coding/logic issue where in my dream I came up with a solution that actually worked in reality.
I have the feeling all software devs had that happen to them once, me included.
I made the mistake of admitting it though. Someone asked me how I came up with that interesting idea, and I said I saw it in a dream. They just stared at me as if I said I smoke weed in the corporate bathroom and perform seances as a side hustle 😂
Seance coding is the new vibe coding. Get the ouija board out! Add stickers to add a few characters like ±();&?!|.
Ok grandpa, how do we fix the bug?
Tap for seance
Ok stop, this isn’t grandpa, we accidentally channeled a daemon again
If I remember right, the trick that makes sewing machines work came to the inventor in a dream.
The inventor was exploring the jungle or something like that in his dream, and got attacked by spear-wielding savages. The spears all had a hole near the tip. Which was what he was missing to make the sewing machine work - he’d been trying to make it work with the hole in the back, like a regular sewing needle.
Didn’t the guy who discovered carbocycles dream of a serpent biting its tail rolling around chasing him and the next day he was like, shit, hydrocarbons can probably loop around too.
Ah, I hadn’t heard about that one!
We all pray to the machine god, brother
Yeah. Not the code specifics itself, but definitely the method or code structure.
That makes four of us… at least.
Yes, I’ve had this happen many times. Go to bed thinking about a software problem, wake up thinking “what if…” and then I go implement it and it works
When I was in college I was super stuck on a calculus homework problem. I worked on it futilely for hours before giving up and deciding to email my instructor about it in the morning. That night I solved the problem in my dream, and when I woke up I actually remembered the dream and it was the correct solution. My instructor thought it was hilarious when I told him about it in class.
I remember a dream study that found if you’re working on a skill within something like half an hour of going to sleep, you’re markedly faster at learning the skill. I think they measured it using a skiing video game or something like that
A large part of me really wants to believe that skiing video game was SkiFree 95.
… Because I probably had bad dreams about that yeti as a kid LOL
Hah! I remember the game, but I don’t think that was it.
I saw it on a Discovery documentary or something in high school, as I recall. There were a few shots of the test subject playing a sports skiing console game of some sort
Oh yeah i have dreams like this when i leave engineering coursework too late but, despite having dream insights that solve my problems, i’ve decided it’s more efficient to just never ever leave those things too late again
ha, i was going to post exactly this… its happened a few times