How to Program in Your Sleep

I have had a lot of issues with this for the last few years. I saw someone post on here a few days ago to tell yourself you’ll set a specific time in the future at which you’ll entertain those thoughts. For me, when I find myself thinking about specific work tasks, I just told myself “At 7:30am I will entertain this train of thought”, and did my best to think of literally anything else. I fully expected this to not work at all, but it was effective basically the first night I tried it. I fell right back asleep. The last two nights I’ve tried this have been quite restful. We’ll see how that continues.

A separate but related issue I’ve found is that I’m often dreaming in programming languages now, which is a totally surreal experience. I think this is like how some people say when you move to a new country and learn a new language, there comes a point where the language in your dreams shifts from your native one to your newly immersed language. But I find it happening to me now: a complete standard dream scenario, but all thoughts are expressed completely (and partially nonsensically) in SQL, or python, or classes and subclasses, interfaces, data models, APIs, tests, and error handling. It’s really odd. Especially because it’s not even specifically a work challenge, it’s just like a standard dream but my brains way of constructing it happens to turn it into a technical challenge somehow. These nights are rarely restful.

This probably indicates some underlying anxiety or something that I should more seriously and proactively address, but for now I’m just happy if I can get a restful 6-7 hours in.