Ask HN: As a developer do you ever have dreams where you see and develop code?

A few times, but it was less about the code but more about the “head space” I’m in when I’m coding. I felt like I was programming my brain and I woke up exhausted each time.

I have re-occuring dreams that I am coding programs for DOS in Pascal or Assembler. I cannot make out any of the code.

I have never written a program in Pascal in my entire life.

I'm willing to bet any code thought up in a dream isn't as amazing as it seemed in dream life. Like when you have a nightmare, wake up terrified, and then realize in reality the dream wasn't all that scary. The emotional impact was part of the dreamscape, and just as disjointed and "whacky" as dreams tend to be. Some nights you can think nothing of a dream about the whole world being blown up, while another night you could be frightened out of your wits about a shadow creature that just appeared but didn't actually do anything. Same with "insight."

Keep a dream journal, where you write down your dreams as soon as you wake. You'll quickly notice how random they are, and how some things that seemed clever or amazing at the time weren't very.

I have, but it was years ago when just beginning to learn to code. It was like drifting over a giant scrolling text file filled with code. Kind of like a huge syntax-highlighted version of the Star Wars scroll. Not fun. Would not recommend.

I have had such a dream, at least once. I was writing beautiful code. No, I didn't remember any of the actual code when I woke up.

But I can say that I'm a great programmer - in my dreams.

I've had this a couple times. Mostly the code didn't make sense when I woke up, but just once it was actually a solution to a problem I was working on and I went and implemented it.

I'd rather dream about more fun things though.

The more time I spend as an adult the more boring and mundane my dreams seem to get. The other night I was buying chicken in the supermarket and wincing at the price.

I never have, fortunately. But every time I wake up I have the answers to problems that stumped me the night before.

Title gore aside, I was talking to a colleague and jokingly asked if he ever had dreams or lucid dreams where he sees code or develops with it in the dream, and his response was "yes all the time".

Now I'm curious to find out if this is a common thing?