Saturday, September 10, 2016

Late morning dream

Late yesterday afternoon, I prepared my old cylindrical vacuum cleaner for an evening attack upon the horrible Pyrale moths. Tineke and Serge had informed me that this technique works well, and it's less troublesome than using buckets of soapy water. Everything was in place, and I'd even protected the device and the power cables from a possible nocturnal shower of rain. I decided that it would be preferable for Fitzroy to spend the night inside the house, instead of in his kennel. I liked this decision, because I'm always happier for no clear reason) when my dog is near me, rather than out in the dark.

Everything was ready for the moths... but they simply failed to appear. If I understand correctly, their annual season is nearing the end.

Early this morning, Fitzroy used his snout gently to wake me up, and I took him out for a pee (which didn't take place). Then we came back into the house and I went to sleep again.

A hour or so later, I was awoken by one of my familiar computer-programming dreams, which are sufficiently unpleasant to be labeled nightmares. Unless you happen to be a computer programmer, it's hard to understand the gist of such dreams. In my nightmare, I have the impression that I've installed an arithmetic counter that needs to be constantly updated by newly-obtained numeric values. This counter is in fact installed, but it's clearly not functioning correctly. Instead of increasing regularly, it remains stuck at its initial value, as if there were a bug in the code. In real computer programming, this kind of error would be commonplace and easy to correct. In my nightmare, on the other hand, the presence of this bug troubles me considerably, because I can't understand how the error has occurred, or how I might trace it and fix it. Finally, I'm immensely relieved when I awake from my nightmare. First, I need a minute or so to grasp that no such bug exists. That I was merely dreaming. Then I'm in fine form. For a computer programmer, there's nothing better than knowing that your software is clean, free of bugs. That's how I was this morning, when I took Fitzroy out a second time.

Unfortunately, I'm not likely to chase such dream themes from my mind. It's already many years since I wrote code to update arithmetic counters, but all this experience has remained apparently in my brain. I wonder if I could do some kind of a reboot...

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