Posted by XzetaU8 13 hours ago
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.
It was a completely random series of notes.
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.)
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 :(
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...
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.
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.
generally they don't work out.
For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.
"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.
Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.
There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.
Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.
Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.
Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books?
One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say.
And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?
Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".
I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.
Yes, precisely.
There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.
There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.
My dominant personality is one of control (for order) so I can focus on problem solving. Some sort of raw insight/intelligence comes from a personality that isn't always on, but seems to erupt from periods of calm and relaxation. eg Shower solutions or bedtime revelations are common.
Many people have told stories of voices that nudge them this way or that at just the right time, which I've experienced as well. Whatever part of me dreams is uses memories and fantasy, striving to experiencing new scenarios through thought experiments. The better I sleep, the more I find very recent events are incorporated...so it's some sort of shared space and speaks to how physical state affects mental states, even in sleep. I also feel like the personalities fight for dominance when the body or mind is overly-stressed (puberty, mortal danger, etc) but normally resolve into a sort of basal state.
I never wanted to be a psychologist. I often think that maybe I'm just crazy. It would explain a lot.
> I often think that maybe I'm just crazy.
Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.
During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.
One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"
I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.
Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
So far I’m not that impressed.
I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.
> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.
> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.
Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.
like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?
have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?
IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.
YES! I have never told anyone this (because it feels so random) but it's great to know I'm not the only one. I pretty much expect this when I am in depths of an issue I cant somehow consciously resolve, so much that I keep a pen and writing pad next to me, before I sleep, because the code I saw in my dream often gets lost by the time I go to my office and resume the laptop.
I even figured out a hack - I just force myself to go to sleep if I can't consciously resolve it for more than an hour. It's as if my brain gets an otherwise untapped firepower.
That said, this absolutely destroys my sleep cycle for the next day or two and spikes my BP for the rest of the day to the point where I feel sick.
Although in theory I'm sleeping more than the 8h, I feel horribly mentally exhausted. I can work out, physically just fine but my brain is on empty - because of this, I limit this to critical blockers.
But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.
No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.
I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.
Have a good day.
It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.