Comment by mr-wendel
2 days ago
I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.
I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.
While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.
Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.
When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory.
It was a completely random series of notes.
Many years ago I had such a profound insight in one of my dreams that I woke up and wrote it down on an index card so I wouldn't forget.
Here's the pearl of wisdom I captured for posterity:
"Emotions — it's emotions that invented and fricasseed the invisible ravioli."
(I still have the card.)
William James reported that a friend of his who was experimenting with nitrous oxide gas kept thinking he'd solved the riddle of the universe when high, but kept forgetting what he'd figured out when he woke up in the morning, so he kept a pen and paper next to him while high and rushed down the following morning to see that he'd written "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."
Love your pearl of wisdom. Don't know if this was the intent, but it made me laugh despite feeling a bit sad today.
Like Flaming Globes of Sigmund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Attack#Plot
At least you now have a title for your autobiography!
Yea, I have composed song (music with lyrics) in my dream. But after waking up, didn't remember most of it.
I wonder if I did compose them, or did I just have a memory of having composed a great song?
What is experience, if not our very latest memory, right?
Giuseppe Tartini claimed his violin sonata "Il trillo del diavolo" (Devil's trill) was played to him by the devil itself during a dream. However, unlike you, Tartini declared that he had been able to capture only a small part of the music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Trill_Sonata
A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help.
I made noises with my mouth, and it still sounded cool. Instead of recording those noises into any recording on my phone, I went back to sleep and couldn’t remember it the next morning :(
That's why Keith Richards kept a tape recorder on his bedside table. He credits it with capturing the famous riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which came to him in a dream.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...
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I often have the experience that I've discovered a really good idea in a dream. It happens often enough that I recognize it as a dream and I become curious about whether it will actually be a good idea when I wake up, because almost as often it is random and silly. I spend the rest of the dream intent on remembering it, and usually I do. Every once in a while I get a melody or an idea I want to run with, but it always makes me excited and ready to work.
Happens to songwriters too, sometimes it goes somewhere. I had a dream once, on the morning of a July 4th, that for some reason took a really common cliche jazz/blues riff and slowed it way down while I was dreaming of a bunch of Americana images. It became this song, the riff is at the beginning: https://music.apple.com/us/album/so-beautiful/899061469?i=89...
I wish it would happen more often, that's only happened for one other song of mine. Most of the rest are a lot of gritted teeth and frustration.
I have made poetry in some dreams which feels very profound and very rhyming (I have zero poeticness or interest in poetry) but I also remember that a few times when I did wake up with those words still in my head, it was a mish mash of words.
Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.
Selected Ambient Works!
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“Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin
Supposedly that's how Keith Richards came up with Satisfaction.
At uni on an advanced algorithms class we had a take-home exam with 6 problems for 3 days or so.
On Saturday I already had some ideas for most problems, but there was one that I didn't knew how to approach and stayed a bit late thinking about it.
On Sunday morning I woke up really exited as I solved the damn problem. I immediately knew that probably like dreams, the memory was fragile, so I rushed to my desk to write the sketch for the idea, which after grabbing coffee turned into my solution to it.
There's no way I didn't spent my sleep thinking about it and solving it, likely around the last sleep cycle when I woke up.
Reminds me of one childhood experience, which was much less serious, but for me quite amazing:
I had an old MSDOS computer, which had a mouse, but the mouse did not work at all. Perhaps that computer didn't have the drivers or maybe no such thing existed at that time. That computer had DOS games on it. Just that I could not access some of the applications, when their executables were not immediately children of a top level folder, because I didn't know how to expand folders in the tree view pane, without having the mouse to click on the + in front of the folder name.
One day I had a dream of me sitting at the computer (I spent a lot of time playing as a kid). In my dream I was lamenting, that I could open those folders. Suddenly a voice in my head said: "Well, why don't you simply try pressing the + key?"
I woke up and was excited. Immediately I started that computer to try it. And what do you know ... it actually worked!! More games for me to play!
Years later I also found myself often dreaming of chess games and thinking about best moves, only to have the board grow dynamically and somewhere far away a bishop appearing, pinning exactly the piece I needed for my best move ... back to the drawing board. Those chess dreams were actually somewhat exhausting.
I remember in uni two days after taking an exam I dreamed about the professor asking me to explain the calculationd I made, and while I was going through them I realized at some point I did an addition instead of a subtraction.
I woke up and indeed I made that mistake. (This was during covid so the exam was done remotely and I still had the paper with the calculations at home).
My experience was with building a new computer. I had gotten all of the parts needed to completely upgrade my pc, keeping only the case.After installing all of them, the computer refused to boot and just showed a generic error with a blinking light. I tried multiple things to troubleshoot like taking out each ram stick, different hdd, reseating cables, different hdd, change to internal gpu, nothing worked.
Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning, I had a very strong feeling that the issue was definitely the memory and I had to move the ram to the set of slots for the other channel. And that was the issue, broken slots.
What's impressive is not that it worked, but that after waking up I had no doubt that was the problem, even though practically I couldn't conciously identify why I was so confident about it.
Can't say I have had such a productive dream for work, but I have had dreams that helped me process emotions. For example, on separate occasions many years apart (thankfully), I've dreamt I saw a recently departed pet or family member one more time. In one specific instance, I had been so caught up in other things I hadn't actually processed the grief of the loss. Can safely say it was super helpful, if painful, and necessary.
There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.
Had a very similar one, I wasn't working frontend but had a dream about a frontend vulnerability that also proved to be true. I dreamed about it, and assume it was because it's the kind of thing that bugs me and while dreaming I had some time to think about things other than the code at hand.
Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?
Only in my dreams! erm...
The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play.
generally they don't work out.
I wonder if you have, but that normally what dreams provide is often just delivered subconsciously. You might be regarding a lot of great ideas as having occured when you were awake even though maybe some would never have come had you not slept/dreamt on them.
I think it was franklin who would ponder himself to sleep with metal balls in his hands so it'll wake him up.
Thomas Edison.
so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.