Okay…so I’m 52 years old now and I shouldn’t eat a heavy meal before bedtime anymore.  So I ate a Checkers burger and fries late last night, and then didn’t sleep very well the rest of that night.  So I was kinda tired when I came home from work today and walked in the door to my little Baltimore rowhouse and right up the stairs to my bedroom and took a nap.  And I had three very vivid dreams in a row.  And then a forth very short one that kicked me back awake.

In the first dream I was having a pleasant conversation with someone I used to know, who passed away many years ago.  We were walking around my old high school neighborhood and chatting pleasantly.  In the second dream I was watching some co-workers at Space Telescope assembling some sort of space probe.  There were people standing around watching the process who were all smoking cigarettes and the room was thick with it, and someone said they needed to back off or the cigarette smoke would contaminate the probe.  In the third dream I was sitting on the floor in front of my TV watching some strange cartoon show.  It was a comedy about three klutzy super heroes, each of whom had been independently assigned to fight the same two dangerous evil nasty super villains…but somehow each of them mistook the other two super heroes for the two super villains, and so they were constantly fighting each other to a draw in every episode and never realizing they were fighting the wrong people.

I began, as I sometimes do, to realize I was dreaming, and I thought to myself "These are pretty idiotic dreams I’m having now.  The guy I was talking with in the first dream has been dead for years, and he never talked much to me in real life anyway.  We don’t assemble space probes at the Institute, and nobody in their right mind assembles space probes in a smoke filled room.  And that cartoon’s central joke would get old after just a few episodes…"

…and then…

…suddenly it was as if I had been pulled back to another place.  I was looking down at a table with three, open three ring binders on it.  Each binder was open to a page of some sort of software code print-out.  Somehow I knew it was code anyway.  But I’d never seen its like.  I realized…somehow…that each binder was open to the page with the code on it for one of the three dreams I’d just had.  It…felt like…something said to me something along the lines of "okay…you don’t like those dreams…then fix them."

I looked more carefully at the code.  It was strange.  Just a series of one line statements, one after the other after the other.  It had been run through a print formatter, similar to what my programmer’s editor will do if you print code out from within it, with certain keywords and values in bold or italicized fonts to make it easier to read.  But the character set was weird.  I can’t reproduce it here, but the format of the statements was something like this:

XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x

Just that…one line after another after another, for about fifteen to twenty lines per dream. Each statement began with something like…I dunno…it seemed to be some kind of big and bolded keyword that I somehow knew was an identifier of some kind.  Then there were between two and three smaller italicized words that…again somehow…I knew were modifiers of some sort.  Then a sentence like structure of maybe a dozen or so more words that…somehow…I knew was an expression of some kind.  One complete dream might look something like this:

XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx
XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
XXXXXXXX x xx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxx xx x x x xx xx x xxxxx
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx xx
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxx
XXXXXXXXXX x xxx x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx
XXXXXXXXX xx x xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxx xxx xx x x
XXXXXXX xx xxxx x xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx
XXXXXXXXXX x xxx xx x xx xxxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx x
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xx
XXXXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx
XXXXXXX xx xxx xx xxx xxx xxxxx x xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxxx
XXXXXX xxx xxx xx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx x xxxx
XXXXXXXXXX x x x x xx xxxxx xxx xxxx xx xx xxxxx xx x x xx

It was weird.  I stood there looking at it and thought to myself "This is the most monotonal code I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It’s too uniform.  I don’t see any flow control, operators, conditionals branching…  What the hell?"  And while part of me was thinking "I can’t edit this…I don’t understand it" another part was thinking "You’re kidding….This is what makes a dream?"

And then I woke up…

Mothers…don’t let your kids grow up to be programmers…