My sleep has been all messed up.
I’ve been an early riser for several years now. I get up two or three hours before work so that I can exercise and write. I like to get home after an eight-hour day and have all of my goals accomplished so that I can relax. I’ve been doing much of the same during my tenure at Tech Elevator. I get up around 5:30, exercise, and then get to the North Side by 7:30 to either finish up work from the day before, run some drills on techniques, or just hang out and talk with the other students.
But when I was working at Barnes & Noble, I was able to sleep peacefully. Not the case with my current situation.
Getting up at 5:30 means that I start to feel pretty drowsy around 8:30 or 9:00 pm. I’m in bed by 9:30 and almost always asleep by 10:00. Then the weirdness starts.
Have you ever been quasi-asleep and thought that you were in public? Like, at a school dance, or maybe at a party? You walk around having strange conversations with the party-goers with the half-realization that you are, in fact, in your bed. Now and then you wake fully and say, “What am I doing? I’m not at a party. Go to sleep, dummy.”
I have these half-dreams every single night. And they’re about coding. I can see the code in front of me in the darkness of my bedroom, the blue “if” statements, the green Classes, the amber string text. The red, squiggly lines of my mistakes haunt me. I turn the code over in my head with otherworldly dream logic trying to find the right loop, the correct constructors to solve my problem. Every hour on the hour, I wake up and say, “You’re not coding. Go to sleep, dummy.”
I can’t stop. I rarely sleep deeply anymore. And when I do, the dreams have been vivid and intense. Not every single dream has involved Tech Elevator, but most of them have. In one of my strangest dreams, I took my parents to the school to show them where I’ve been studying. Also, apparently, I had left my wallet there by accident. I went into the .Net classroom to retrieve the wallet and when I came out into the main space, I found that my mother had torn up several of the floorboards.
I was aghast at the turn of events. When I asked why she did this, she said she thought she was helping. She also admitted to tearing up floorboards in the hallway leading to TE and in Caitie’s office (which I believe in reality is carpeted).
I suppose I could parse this with some Freudian queries, but I’m just going to let it go. I need less thinking in my life, not more. What I need more of is sleep.
From Retail to Programming 