From: phillipg@microsoft.UUCP (Phillip GARDING) Newsgroups: alt.dreams Subject: Dreaming in LISP (was Re: Computers in dreams) Date: 4 Jun 90 15:42:21 GMT Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
When I was in college, the first quarter of an AI class (hi, Prof. Kessler!) was just learning LISP, and we had weekly programming assignments that took about twenty hours each. I was working on this class almost nonstop (in addition to my other three classes, working part time and trying to spend some time with my wife and son). I was not getting much sleep. I had two very unusual dreams during this time:
I dreamed that my son, my wife and I were trapped inside a LISP function, and we couldn't get out. We walked through S-expressions that looked like tunnels. At the end of each tunnel was a closing parenthesis, and when we passed through the closing paren we would end up in another tunnel. After walking for a long time, we got very tired and were desperately trying to find the closing paren for the function. I believe I woke up before we ever found it.
During this time, my son was waking up at night, crying. Either my wife or I would have to go in and get him back to sleep. One night when my son woke up, my wife roused me out of another LISP dream, telling me it was my turn to go and take care of him. I had been dreaming that each of us was in a different function, and the only way that we could communicate was to call the other function. I asserted to my wife that I couldn't take care of our son because I didn't know what parameters were needed to call his function. After several attempts to figure out what it was that I was saying (my wife knows *very* little about programming), she said, "Go to sleep! I'll do it myself!" And she did.
# Phillip Garding (phillipg@microsoft), helping make MS Word a way of life # # "The mainspring of this country, wound up as tight as it is, # is guaranteed for the life of the watch." -- our President
