Sleep over it

When I was younger I gave a premium to sleeping well; because I wanted to be smart...hold on let me explain. There was this book entitled "Doctors" written by Erich Segal telling the individual stories of a group of...well...doctors. The smartest one was "Seth" who does not do overnight studies. He sleeps early on the day before the exam. Or on any day at all.

Now you may be asking, "You're following an idea based on a fictional book?" Hey, just because something was present in fiction literature doesn't mean the idea in itself is fictional. It's not like you can re-write all the rules -- even in fiction soda is still not beer, and the sun still rises in the east. Of course there are fiction that re-write a lot of rules, but this book was not one of those. But now we are starting to digress, so just let it go...

I've been losing sleep anyway starting from college as I try to uphold to programmer/hacker persona. Plus it is easier to program when nobody is at your back able to watch you while you do your porn break. Plus the chicks are online in irc only at night (mirc was the facebook back then).

But whenever I face a very tough problem, my body somehow just auto shuts down and I become very sleepy regularly. Now some might argue it was depression but I think it was because my brain just wanted to concentrate on the problem and did not need the distractions of this thing called...life.

And I always solve the problems after getting several hours of sleep. It's like studying unconsciously. (Side note: People sleeping around I guess were not horny, they just were just doing group study. I wish I was such a studious person.)

There must be really something into dreaming. Which was why King Solomon (let's stop the debate for a moment whether he and his line was fictional or not) went for a dream.

Just last night I've once again discovered the solution to a software design problem; in my sleep. Previous times I've solved programming problems, come up with decryption algorithms, figure out a video game puzzle, heck even discover the key Chess and Go moves of the games I was reviewing.

I even googled this phenomenon to see if I was the only person seeing this, and found that I'm not. Scientists even somewhat conclude that this is very plausible:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/learning-while-you-dream/
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20041223/dreams-can-solve-problems

Okay now that I think I'm into something, I should:

1. ask to get paid more as I am working even in my sleep.
2. Advocate sleeping at work (and have it called brain storming)
3. figure out my life (again). Dreaming of setting up computer servers and writing software might indicate that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere. Shouldn't I be dreaming of Ana Ivanovic, Megan Fox, and Jennifer Grey (yeah, I'd tap that)?

Oh I just remembered, there was one dream where I had a hot pornstar girlfriend...but let me save that for another blog post.