This morning (as of the time of writing) I had a very weird experience: I woke up while dreaming so I remembered it, and in that dream I successfully debugged a program in a way that actually works when I think about it while I’m awake.

The program wasn’t real, of course, but it was very curious that the bug was perfectly possible. It was some sort of program like one of the ones I work on at my day job and the program tagged commands it sent to the server with a string. Each command also includes a tag for the next command, which the next command must include. Another developer overrode the current tag, and consequently the client program didn’t have the right command tag for the next command, so its commands wouldn’t be accepted. The overriding of the tag would in fact cause subsequent commands to not be accepted, and the fix would be to resynchronize the client with the server (whether by changing the next command tag on the server or the previous command tag on the client).

The normal experience of figuring out the solution to a problem in one’s dreams is to find out that the perception that the solution worked was just a feature of the dream, and it doesn’t really work, if one can even remember what the solution even was. I find it very interesting that it was possible to have a real solution in a dream where the problem was also a creation of the dream, and the sort of problem is entirely a human creation (computer programs).

I suspect that this is why programming and video games are so popular among atheists; since these things are creation of the human mind they feel safe in a way that things which exist apart from the human mind are not safe.