Code in your sleep?

Drakla

Does anybody here ever do programming work in their sleep? You know, you suddenly realise you're dreaming about coding - not fantasy stuff, real stuff you're working on right now and then have to say to yourself in your dream "Oi - cut that out, get some real sleep!"

I've done it loads of times and I'm off to bed now, but have got a complex sql query to write and know damn well I'm going to be working on it in bed.

Anyone else get a dose of this?

planetsim

Yes, however I usually figure its a way of my brain helping me to solve the problem so once its back in overdrive I usually know its time to get out of bed and start again (thats if I can usually im way too tired). The times I do get out of bed I usually find that I solve the problem that was bugging me before I slept.

harmor

While I'm falling asleep from coding thoughts run through my mind "what if I change this to that" then I get up and try it.

Usually it works aand sometimes it doesn't

thorpe

man... i thought i was allone here. i am absoluteley addicted to this stuff. not just php, but programming in general.

kinda strange for me as i work 11pm - 7am, so at times its hard to sleep anyway. the other day though, i had not long gone to bed (about 4pm) and one of our (my wife and i) friends came over knoking on the windows. quickly i awoke, and instantly my brain started ticking its way through this nested set thing ive been working on for the last few weeks.

funny how its not the noise that keeps me awake, but my thoughts.

Elizabeth

they say you're supposed to stop working 1-2 hours before you go to bed-- that's my problem. I usually do a lot of work after the kids are in bed, and that makes me dream about the stuff all night. It sucks! I can think of numerous other things that would be more fun to dream about.

laserlight

they say you're supposed to stop working 1-2 hours before you go to bed

Gah, I'm often still working on stuff 1-2 hours after I'm supposed to have gone to bed.
I dont recall coding in my sleep though.

Jason_Batten

I think I've had at least one. I know just when I am settling into bed I get the urge to do work but my body is too tired.

BuzzLY

planetsim wrote:
...buggering me before I slept.

Wow. Now that's a typo!

justsomeone

I find that a bottle or two of red wine at bedtime helps ensure that my thoughts drift from programming.

vaaaska

I really enjoy that five min period just before falling asleep when I can organize the perfect, idyllic work day.

But I do wish I didn't ever need to sleep as well...

Weedpacket

Hmm... I like the fifteen minutes or so after waking - when my thought processes are still making no sense whatsoever. There was one occasion when I convinced myself that I needed to recode the budgie's cage in HTML. At the time I had even managed to figure out how.

More than once I found myself embroiled in the fag-ends of a mindset that belongs in some other space (such as the space of all finite ASCII strings) where I'm perceiving programs and other such structures like they were physical entities.

Needless to say: I make no attempt to get up at this stage.

Disturbingly, those fifteen minutes often make more sense than the rest of the day.

And I never get stuck into a project until after I've slept on it. It helps.

LoganK

Quote from Garfield (yes, the fat orange cat):

Garfield the Cat wrote:
I'd like sleep better if I were awake to enjoy it.

I agree completely with that. Although I've never coded in my sleep, I have disjoined a computer from a Windows 200 domain in my sleep.

BuzzLY

Windows 200? Wow. I didn't know they had computers way back then. What was it, a rock? Must have been a pain in the neck to reboot :p

Merve

I have never dreamt about programming, but I've thought about it before falling asleep. My dreams usually consist of flying and riding on buses.

Then again, I really haven't done any programming in a while :glare:

LoganK

BuzzLY wrote:
Windows 200? Wow. I didn't know they had computers way back then. What was it, a rock? Must have been a pain in the neck to reboot :p

Let me tell you...back in my day, we didn't even had punch cards. Just punches. Our fists would get destroyed just entering the simplest instructions. And then we had to enter in the whole thing again, just to check it.

Edit: It wasn't a rock, but it had 200 whole bytes of memory! 200! Can you believe that? What will we ever fill up 200 bytes with?

LoganK

Merve wrote:
I have never dreamt about programming, but I've thought about it before falling asleep. My dreams usually consist of flying and riding on buses.

Odd, I have the same dreams. GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!

Elizabeth

Merve wrote:
I have never dreamt about programming, but I've thought about it before falling asleep. My dreams usually consist of flying and riding on buses.

Then again, I really haven't done any programming in a while :glare:

From the Dream Dictionary :

Flying
To dream that you are flying, signifies a sense of freedom where you had initially felt restricted and limited.

Bus
To dream that you are riding a bus, implies that you are going along with the crowd. You are lacking originality and are taking no control over where your life is taking.

Whaddya think? Hold any truth?

Merve

I'm not sure about the flying one, but the bus one is definitely true (although I think I have some miniscule amount of creativity or originality) :eek:

LoganK

Merve wrote:
(although I think I have some miniscule amount of creativity or originality)

Especially if you have delusions of finding a man in the moon 😉

Weedpacket

I remember Windows 200. It's the one with the innovative Point-and-Grunt interface.