5 ms·

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access. 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.

ahimthedream 5mo ago
Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?
- mr-wendel 5mo ago
  Only in my dreams! erm... 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.
  - serf 5mo ago
    i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play. generally they don't work out.
- ASalazarMX 5mo ago
  While I grudgingly recognize that your brain is indeed significantly sharper the younger you are (so epiphanies like that become less likely through the years), I think this experience came from subconsciously recognizing patterns, and gathering enough experience and interest so it could be pieced together by sleeping on it. In the 90s I was obsessed with Tetris, and actually found new strategies while dreaming. It is such a simple game that the dreams weren't unrealistic, contrary to other dream epiphanies that turned out to be gibberish to the awakened mind.
Unai 5mo ago
When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory. It was a completely random series of notes.
- wahnfrieden 5mo ago
  Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.
  - pillefitz 5mo ago
    Selected Ambient Works!
    - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
      the 2nd one only
  - y-curious 5mo ago
    “Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin
- murkt 5mo ago
  A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help. 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 :(
  - tmoertel 5mo ago
    That's why Keith Richards kept a tape recorder on his bedside table. He credits it with capturing the famous riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which came to him in a dream. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-richards-wrote-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-in-his-sleep-236461/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...
rambojohnson 5mo ago
so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.
dietr1ch 5mo ago
At uni on an advanced algorithms class we had a take-home exam with 6 problems for 3 days or so. 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.
tapland 5mo ago
Had a very similar one, I wasn't working frontend but had a dream about a frontend vulnerability that also proved to be true. I dreamed about it, and assume it was because it's the kind of thing that bugs me and while dreaming I had some time to think about things other than the code at hand.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
burnerRhodov2 5mo ago
I think it was franklin who would ponder himself to sleep with metal balls in his hands so it'll wake him up.
- Qem 5mo ago
  Thomas Edison.
NBJack 5mo ago
Can't say I have had such a productive dream for work, but I have had dreams that helped me process emotions. For example, on separate occasions many years apart (thankfully), I've dreamt I saw a recently departed pet or family member one more time. In one specific instance, I had been so caught up in other things I hadn't actually processed the grief of the loss. Can safely say it was super helpful, if painful, and necessary. There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.
SkiFire13 5mo ago
I remember in uni two days after taking an exam I dreamed about the professor asking me to explain the calculationd I made, and while I was going through them I realized at some point I did an addition instead of a subtraction. I woke up and indeed I made that mistake. (This was during covid so the exam was done remotely and I still had the paper with the calculations at home).
WhyIsItAlwaysHN 5mo ago
My experience was with building a new computer. I had gotten all of the parts needed to completely upgrade my pc, keeping only the case.After installing all of them, the computer refused to boot and just showed a generic error with a blinking light. I tried multiple things to troubleshoot like taking out each ram stick, different hdd, reseating cables, different hdd, change to internal gpu, nothing worked. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning, I had a very strong feeling that the issue was definitely the memory and I had to move the ram to the set of slots for the other channel. And that was the issue, broken slots. What's impressive is not that it worked, but that after waking up I had no doubt that was the problem, even though practically I couldn't conciously identify why I was so confident about it.
zelphirkalt 5mo ago
Reminds me of one childhood experience, which was much less serious, but for me quite amazing: I had an old MSDOS computer, which had a mouse, but the mouse did not work at all. Perhaps that computer didn't have the drivers or maybe no such thing existed at that time. That computer had DOS games on it. Just that I could not access some of the applications, when their executables were not immediately children of a top level folder, because I didn't know how to expand folders in the tree view pane, without having the mouse to click on the + in front of the folder name. One day I had a dream of me sitting at the computer (I spent a lot of time playing as a kid). In my dream I was lamenting, that I could open those folders. Suddenly a voice in my head said: "Well, why don't you simply try pressing the + key?" I woke up and was excited. Immediately I started that computer to try it. And what do you know ... it actually worked!! More games for me to play! Years later I also found myself often dreaming of chess games and thinking about best moves, only to have the board grow dynamically and somewhere far away a bishop appearing, pinning exactly the piece I needed for my best move ... back to the drawing board. Those chess dreams were actually somewhat exhausting.
flippyhead 5mo ago
I wonder if you have, but that normally what dreams provide is often just delivered subconsciously. You might be regarding a lot of great ideas as having occured when you were awake even though maybe some would never have come had you not slept/dreamt on them.

ahimthedream 5mo ago

Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?

mr-wendel 5mo ago
Only in my dreams! erm... 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.
- serf 5mo ago
  i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play. generally they don't work out.
ASalazarMX 5mo ago
While I grudgingly recognize that your brain is indeed significantly sharper the younger you are (so epiphanies like that become less likely through the years), I think this experience came from subconsciously recognizing patterns, and gathering enough experience and interest so it could be pieced together by sleeping on it. In the 90s I was obsessed with Tetris, and actually found new strategies while dreaming. It is such a simple game that the dreams weren't unrealistic, contrary to other dream epiphanies that turned out to be gibberish to the awakened mind.

Unai 5mo ago

When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory. It was a completely random series of notes.

wahnfrieden 5mo ago
Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.
- pillefitz 5mo ago
  Selected Ambient Works!
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    the 2nd one only
- y-curious 5mo ago
  “Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin
murkt 5mo ago
A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help. 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 :(
- tmoertel 5mo ago
  That's why Keith Richards kept a tape recorder on his bedside table. He credits it with capturing the famous riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which came to him in a dream. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-richards-wrote-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-in-his-sleep-236461/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...

rambojohnson 5mo ago

so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.

dietr1ch 5mo ago

At uni on an advanced algorithms class we had a take-home exam with 6 problems for 3 days or so. 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.

tapland 5mo ago

Had a very similar one, I wasn't working frontend but had a dream about a frontend vulnerability that also proved to be true. I dreamed about it, and assume it was because it's the kind of thing that bugs me and while dreaming I had some time to think about things other than the code at hand.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

burnerRhodov2 5mo ago

I think it was franklin who would ponder himself to sleep with metal balls in his hands so it'll wake him up.

Qem 5mo ago
Thomas Edison.

NBJack 5mo ago

Can't say I have had such a productive dream for work, but I have had dreams that helped me process emotions. For example, on separate occasions many years apart (thankfully), I've dreamt I saw a recently departed pet or family member one more time. In one specific instance, I had been so caught up in other things I hadn't actually processed the grief of the loss. Can safely say it was super helpful, if painful, and necessary. There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.

SkiFire13 5mo ago

I remember in uni two days after taking an exam I dreamed about the professor asking me to explain the calculationd I made, and while I was going through them I realized at some point I did an addition instead of a subtraction. I woke up and indeed I made that mistake. (This was during covid so the exam was done remotely and I still had the paper with the calculations at home).

WhyIsItAlwaysHN 5mo ago

My experience was with building a new computer. I had gotten all of the parts needed to completely upgrade my pc, keeping only the case.After installing all of them, the computer refused to boot and just showed a generic error with a blinking light. I tried multiple things to troubleshoot like taking out each ram stick, different hdd, reseating cables, different hdd, change to internal gpu, nothing worked. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning, I had a very strong feeling that the issue was definitely the memory and I had to move the ram to the set of slots for the other channel. And that was the issue, broken slots. What's impressive is not that it worked, but that after waking up I had no doubt that was the problem, even though practically I couldn't conciously identify why I was so confident about it.

zelphirkalt 5mo ago

Reminds me of one childhood experience, which was much less serious, but for me quite amazing: I had an old MSDOS computer, which had a mouse, but the mouse did not work at all. Perhaps that computer didn't have the drivers or maybe no such thing existed at that time. That computer had DOS games on it. Just that I could not access some of the applications, when their executables were not immediately children of a top level folder, because I didn't know how to expand folders in the tree view pane, without having the mouse to click on the + in front of the folder name. One day I had a dream of me sitting at the computer (I spent a lot of time playing as a kid). In my dream I was lamenting, that I could open those folders. Suddenly a voice in my head said: "Well, why don't you simply try pressing the + key?" I woke up and was excited. Immediately I started that computer to try it. And what do you know ... it actually worked!! More games for me to play! Years later I also found myself often dreaming of chess games and thinking about best moves, only to have the board grow dynamically and somewhere far away a bishop appearing, pinning exactly the piece I needed for my best move ... back to the drawing board. Those chess dreams were actually somewhat exhausting.

flippyhead 5mo ago

I wonder if you have, but that normally what dreams provide is often just delivered subconsciously. You might be regarding a lot of great ideas as having occured when you were awake even though maybe some would never have come had you not slept/dreamt on them.