I Dream of Code July 27, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

While in college and working towards my degree in Computer Science, I frequently had dreams about coding software. We’d be in the labs for twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day trying to finish these enormous projects, not to mention balancing all of our other classes. And sometimes when I dreamed, I would see the code before me, not some amorphous representation of the code, but the actual code (or so I thought) that was, from looking at it so often, buried deep in my subconscious. And I also remember one specific time where I solved a problem I was having in my sleep — literally debugging in my sleep — and when I awoke and tested the solution I discovered that it had worked. Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve had such dreams, but last night I dreamt not of code but of writing. I have been working on both a short story and a novel concurrently, and last night in my dreams I kept rearranging text and sections over and over again. This time the contents weren’t as clear, and I know it’s probably because I was obsessing about one particular story I was working on. I came up with the story idea under one premise, added a second premise to it as I started writing, and then when I finished I added another element to it which may or may not mean I have to go back to the beginning and add/change more text. It’s already at 8000 words. I still have a week to fiddle with it before my writers’ group will take a look at it.

In a fit of nostalgia, I went over to the C64 website and downloaded a few old Commodore games. I played “Times of Lore” and one of my favorites, “Space Taxi.” The latter still held most of its fun. I used to know the map to “Times of Lore” by heart, but time has since eroded those neurons. I was thinking this morning as I slowly awoke to jackhammers (yet again) that I grew up in an era without VCRs, DVDs, Cellphones, and personal computers. All these things came about in my lifetime (Supposedly, one of my friend’s father was a beta tester for the Betamax, and we saw a Charlie Brown movie on it for his 7th birthday). I remember when we got our first VCR. We recorded every movie that was on TV. (8pm, HBO anyone?) I remember my first computer, a big and silvery TRS-80 Color Computer. I remember watching “Video Killed the Radio Star” on MTV with my sisters as we all sat on the shag carpet. I said, “What’s MTV?” They said, “It’s like radio except you see them play the music.” I remember my Dad’s car-phone, a big bulky thing that you had to enter like twenty digits just to call home. I remember talking about DVDs in college with my friends. “Can you imagine storing gigbytes on a disk?” we said. (DVDs were originally supposed to hold 17 GB. Now most hold 4.7GB). I remember my first cell phone. I resisted it at first. Who wants to be that available? But I relented and got one for work (what a mistake!) That year, I had no evenings and no weekends as the phone rang wherever I was, including on vacation in Park City, Utah. One day a few months ago I decided to imagine that I was a time traveller, come from a few hundred years in the past, before all this technology we think of as commonplace. I looked at the cars and said, “How strange.” I looked at the cell phones, and the suits, and the bodegas, and the pay phones, and everything, and said “How strange.” And then something happened. For a moment, everything was strange, and I was an alien on my own planet. Who were all these people shuffling to and fro in such a hurry with their gadgets and gizmos? Suddenly, everything old and dry seemed new and strange. Try it sometime. Your mileage may vary. My cousin believes we are in a very primitive time. That in a thousand or tens of thousands of years we’ll look back on this time as a sort of Middle Ages. I can see his point of view too. We still are just starting out in so many ways. But I suppose, as one philosopher put it, there’s an infinite amount of time behind you, there’s an infinite amount of time ahead of you, and in the middle, here you are. There ain’t no changing that.