Back in 2004 I started recording my dreams by typing them into the computer.  I left off in about 2007, and have sporadically entered a few here and there since then.  This was nice, because now they’re in a text file.  However, it also meant that anything I forgot between my bed and my desk wouldn’t get entered.  Since July of this year, I’ve been writing them down in a notepad next to my bed.  This yields slightly zanier results.

The primary purpose of this is to get my conscious mind a little closer to my subconscious mind, let me explore the dream space a little more, and perhaps enable lucid dreaming.  (it’s probably step 2 on the road to lucid dreaming; step 1 is get enough sleep, and step 3 is wake-check yourself (ask, “am I dreaming?") every so often while you’re awake; I’m doing all of these.)  An awesome secondary purpose, though, is to wake up, say “what the hell did I dream last night?”, and have a good answer because I scrawled it in here at 3 AM.  And then I have a good laugh, because dreams are pretty goofy.

Here are some good recent ones (only minimally edited for legibility):

I’m in Entropy at CMU, and I’m buying a ruler to do some research, and I notice that all my papers call a ruler a “great measurer” and refer to the other researchers as “dear researcher” and by the rulers at Entropy there’s a little paper explaining why that is dumb.

I was at my cousin’s house I think.  I was going to take a quick nap before going out, and she was explaining her writing process (she was a student): once a yearish, she’d drink a bunch of chocolate milkshakes and stay up all night, she’d feel terrible but then feel better and be able to write more, or something.  I was going to take a nap.  Somehow I ended up at Denny’s or something, but I needed some food.  I ordered some kind of standard breakfast.  The server brought out first some white toast and pancakes, which I didn’t touch, then some kind of pastry, and an omelet?  I took a couple bites of the pastry.  I noticed a review of the place on the table.  It said something like “the omelet was okay but the standard breakfast was a terrible monstrosity.”  I wondered why they posted that.

I was doing an interview at Google, not sure why but I guess it was for a different job?  Anyway, one of my friends and another guy were interviewing me.  The other guy warned me that this question was really hard, but I got it pretty straightforwardly.  It was: you have a row of numbers, and you can take any 10 of them in a row- how do you maximize your winnings?  (I said, basically, linear search.)

I was in the army or something, and I had to report to drills every morning.  (but they were in my front yard.)  One morning I was late, and the officer made me run to/from this one place that was a long way away.  But he said if I did it in under 1/2 hour, I could take the rest of the day off.  It was hard- I didn’t know if I’d make it.  Also I had a saxophone.  (in its case.)