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Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

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Re: Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

#2
Title gore aside, I was talking to a colleague and jokingly asked if he ever had dreams or lucid dreams where he sees code or develops with it in the dream, and his response was "yes all the time".

Now I'm curious to find out if this is a common thing?

Re: Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

#6
I'm willing to bet any code thought up in a dream isn't as amazing as it seemed in dream life. Like when you have a nightmare, wake up terrified, and then realize in reality the dream wasn't all that scary. The emotional impact was part of the dreamscape, and just as disjointed and "whacky" as dreams tend to be. Some nights you can think nothing of a dream about the whole world being blown up, while another night you could be frightened out of your wits about a shadow creature that just appeared but didn't actually do anything. Same with "insight."

Keep a dream journal, where you write down your dreams as soon as you wake. You'll quickly notice how random they are, and how some things that seemed clever or amazing at the time weren't very.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

#8

A few times, but it was less about the code but more about the “head space” I’m in when I’m coding. I felt like I was programming my brain and I woke up exhausted each time.

Have any of these been tangibly productive towards solving problems in the projects you were working on at the time?

Re: Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

#9
I've had this a couple times. Mostly the code didn't make sense when I woke up, but just once it was actually a solution to a problem I was working on and I went and implemented it.

I'd rather dream about more fun things though.

The more time I spend as an adult the more boring and mundane my dreams seem to get. The other night I was buying chicken in the supermarket and wincing at the price.

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