I don’t know whether anybody else gets these kinds of dreams or not, where it becomes blazingly obvious that this dream is just some sort of symbolic cover for some part of my mind to work out some kind of weird problem that it has been contemplating in the background. I remember back when I was learning to program ASP for my old job, I had this one really involved dream where it was morning time, and my alarm kept going off, and instead of hitting snooze, I had to figure out how to re-program the alarm clock to ring again in five minutes. It was terribly complicated, and not at all restful. I’ve also had dreams where I was zoomed into Photoshop at 1600% and was editing images pixel by pixel, back when I used to do that sort of thing more often.

Last one I had one that was sort of like that, except more complicated and abstract kind of. I had a dream that I was back at my old job, teaching a programming class, and we were looking at some kind of weird equation which we were going to use to loop through something. It’s hard to nail down exactly what the equation was, since numbers and letters tend to kind of shift around in dreams, but I know that it included some combination of the following characters:

Z- * ^+/-T

And then we went into this big long class discussion about what this means and how to use it, and we threw around words like “modulus” and then, we started talking about how this equated to linguistics, and homonyms, and I don’t know. It was really weird. The dream wasn’t so much about what this “equation” meant, but the teaching and the kind of interaction that was generated around it to get people to look at a problem as a group and figure out how to solve it. I woke up feeling really weirdly energized by it, like I had learned something important, or figured out something crazy, but yeah, I don’t really know what it is.