Thread: programmers/scriptors, lend me your thoughts

Idk what scripting is but if you can give me some sort of explanation than i could try in my next LD.

Originally Posted by acillis

t...could you script in a lucid dream? you know? what im saying, maybe you could program some out of the world crap in lucid dreams......

Of course you can. The only problem is it drastically changes the nature of your dreams. Instead of traveling down a street and taking a left at an intersection, you're traveling down the code and making a turn at the "if" statement, cycling through a loop a few times, and exiting in a function. When you do a lot of programming, that's what happens, and it's not really that fun.

I did a bit in freebasic. It was pretty hard when I got into it. Now I appreciate video games a million times more... When it took me an hour ish to make a 2 minute novelty program, I can't imagine what a full on masterpiece like mafia 2 would take..

TheCusp (or anyone else who has tried): Isn't it hard to remember anything you've written once you wake up? Both since dream recall can be tricky, and text tends to change freely in dreams. I'm a programmer myself and maybe I'll try sometime. The description of literally driving around in a program structure doesn't sound all that appealing tho But maybe to solve a specific problem instead? Like using the dream to get ideas, rather than specific code?

very good point

Well... there are two possibilities here.

1. If you're saying "You could use programming in dreams as a form of dream control" then I would say, "Why would you bother?"

For instance say you want to make the entire world red. Why would you try to write code to turn the world red when you could just think, "Become red, world!" I'd rather use magic than do coding any day, and coding is my job!

2. If you're saying "You could use lucid dreaming to write better code", then I would say, "Holy crap that sounds hard."

In addition to the problems hallahill mentioned, coding anything significant is a very difficult process. Imagine trying to solve a very difficult, very complex mathematical problem in your head. That is what programming in a dream would be like.

Haha, I like the idea of coding the dream world around you as you go Maybe something simpler, like walking around with a CSS style sheet in your hand and giving attributes to stuff you see. It'd be the most impractical, geeky thing I'd ever do. "Guess what guize? Tonight I controlled my dream, so I figured I could change the world's stylesheet to give all trees 2px dotted black borders"

edit: Hiro, now I can't do anything but think of silly things to do with programming the dream world around you. Like creating loops for making yourself an army of 90 000 clones of yourself. Or breaking the syntax and see what happens if the world has a syntax error. NO! I don't wanna be a nerdy dreamer, damn you And of course, as you say, anything can be achieved by normal dream control anyhow.

I think it'd be pointless to write actual code in dreams. First of all it'd be hard to remember the actual code when you woke up and second, I'm not sure your brain would be able to find errors or execute anything other than what you expected it to execute. On the other hand, Hallahill has a good point. If you can't get past a problem you can try going to sleep and thinking of more creative solutions in your dreams?