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Mar. 5th, 2005 08:18 amHad somewhat of a rough night - constant drifting and waking, and one constant dream that kept intruding into my thoughts, pushing aside whatever I was thinking about, and overriding any other dreams.
Some background information first.
First, I've been spending the past week working on a multi-section maintenance program with a number of multi-dimensional dynamic arrays, and some intricate ways of dancing around the data and getting it into the database.
Second, despite all that you may have read (if you have been reading them!) in recent posts, I am not reading Firebringer - the wife hijacked that before I could get to it. While in a holding pattern there, she cleared me for Spirits in the Wire. So far, I've gotten as far as the second time the blank browser screen started to show an expanding pattern, as if something was trying to escape from the net.
Third, yesterday morning I read an article in the Berklee alumni magazine about, in part, a concert at Auschwitz.
Fourth, I listened to the Schindler's List soundtrack in the car yesterday - I had selected it a few days before, as I work through my movie soundtracks; it just happened to be next in line.
There, now the dream itself.
As I mentioned at the start, the dream returned again and again, but it did not repeat. It merely showed fragments that progressed.
The dream started as a single dot. That dot gradually grew and expanded, but instead of seeming like an opening eye, it became a pair of parenthesis. As it grew, it became apparent to me that it was a dynamic array, and elements were being added to it. The elements themselves, while just represented by counters, had a menacing nature, and I knew that what was being constructed was Not Good.
Dimensions were being added to the array as well, and more elements began to grow the array. I had to develop code to try to contain the array, but it continued to grow throughout the night. Despite my efforts, the growth continued - not rapidly, but slow and lumbering and dark and threatening. I woke up a few times in the night, even got out of bed twice, and each time I drifted off once more, it returned, relentless.
It stopped growing early in the morning - or, rather, it stopped being the center of my attention. Output, you see, was being produced.
I was no longer coding or dealing with code, but was instead holding a newspaper, and reading an article about some ceremonies at Auschwitz. The article had some opening piece about families from the Lehigh Valley who had many relatives who went into Auschwitz but did not come out. Pictures of the gravestones - only those that were at the head of bodies that could be linked to the local area - were printed below the opening text. As I first looked, there were a few rows of one inch square photos, grainy black and white shots on the paper. As I looked at each gravestone, more were being added, and I realized that the photographs were what the array had been storing, now appearing on newsprint as fast as I could recognize each image. Some had names, others were plain stone, but each one was a victim of the Nazi machine.
When I woke, the paper had scrolled down - filled left to right, and for hundreds of feet, with one inch photos of gravestones - and showed no signs of stopping.
Some background information first.
First, I've been spending the past week working on a multi-section maintenance program with a number of multi-dimensional dynamic arrays, and some intricate ways of dancing around the data and getting it into the database.
Second, despite all that you may have read (if you have been reading them!) in recent posts, I am not reading Firebringer - the wife hijacked that before I could get to it. While in a holding pattern there, she cleared me for Spirits in the Wire. So far, I've gotten as far as the second time the blank browser screen started to show an expanding pattern, as if something was trying to escape from the net.
Third, yesterday morning I read an article in the Berklee alumni magazine about, in part, a concert at Auschwitz.
Fourth, I listened to the Schindler's List soundtrack in the car yesterday - I had selected it a few days before, as I work through my movie soundtracks; it just happened to be next in line.
There, now the dream itself.
As I mentioned at the start, the dream returned again and again, but it did not repeat. It merely showed fragments that progressed.
The dream started as a single dot. That dot gradually grew and expanded, but instead of seeming like an opening eye, it became a pair of parenthesis. As it grew, it became apparent to me that it was a dynamic array, and elements were being added to it. The elements themselves, while just represented by counters, had a menacing nature, and I knew that what was being constructed was Not Good.
Dimensions were being added to the array as well, and more elements began to grow the array. I had to develop code to try to contain the array, but it continued to grow throughout the night. Despite my efforts, the growth continued - not rapidly, but slow and lumbering and dark and threatening. I woke up a few times in the night, even got out of bed twice, and each time I drifted off once more, it returned, relentless.
It stopped growing early in the morning - or, rather, it stopped being the center of my attention. Output, you see, was being produced.
I was no longer coding or dealing with code, but was instead holding a newspaper, and reading an article about some ceremonies at Auschwitz. The article had some opening piece about families from the Lehigh Valley who had many relatives who went into Auschwitz but did not come out. Pictures of the gravestones - only those that were at the head of bodies that could be linked to the local area - were printed below the opening text. As I first looked, there were a few rows of one inch square photos, grainy black and white shots on the paper. As I looked at each gravestone, more were being added, and I realized that the photographs were what the array had been storing, now appearing on newsprint as fast as I could recognize each image. Some had names, others were plain stone, but each one was a victim of the Nazi machine.
When I woke, the paper had scrolled down - filled left to right, and for hundreds of feet, with one inch photos of gravestones - and showed no signs of stopping.
