I code in my dreams

It’s almost midnight again, and I’m still hunched over my keyboard, furiously typing away, working on a side project. The best ideas, the most interesting problems, they always seem to come to me late in the evening. Maybe it’s the quiet, maybe it’s because my brain finally has space to think without the constant ping of notifications, or maybe it’s simply because I’m a natural night owl.

Sometimes I’ll be working on a new feature deep into the night, completely forgetting about the time. Other times I’m wrestling with one of those bugs that’ll drive you absolutely nuts. The code works perfectly fine in development, passes all the tests, but somehow fails intermittently in production. Classic, right? I’ve been staring at this thing for hours, adding logging, reading through stack traces, trying different approaches. It’s one of those problems where you know the solution is probably something really simple and obvious, but you just can’t see it.

By the time I finally give up and crawl into bed, my head is buzzing with variables, function calls, and half-formed solutions. This is where things get weird, and honestly, pretty exhausting.

My brain doesn’t know how to shut off

I’ll lie there in bed, eyes closed, trying to fall asleep, but my mind is still running through the code. I’m mentally stepping through the execution flow, thinking about edge cases, wondering how I can improve performance or make that new feature more elegant.

And then, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, something strange happens. I start actually writing code in my dreams.

I don’t mean I dream about coding – I mean I literally write lines of code, character by character, in my sleep. I’ll be constructing functions, debugging logic, refactoring class structures. My sleeping brain becomes this weird IDE where I’m typing out actual code, complete with proper indentation and everything. It’s like my subconscious has decided it’s going to solve this puzzle whether I’m awake or not.

The really bizarre part? The code usually makes sense. I’m not just dreaming random syntax; I’m writing coherent solutions to the actual problem I was stuck on. I’ll work through imports, define variables, write conditional statements. Sometimes I’ll even dream about writing tests for the code!

It’s exhausting, but it works

Here’s the thing though: I don’t wake up rested. At all. Instead of getting a good night’s sleep, I feel like I’ve been working all night. Which, in a way, I have been. My brain has been churning through code for eight hours straight, and I wake up feeling mentally drained.

The upside is that I usually wake up with fresh insights. Not always a complete solution, but often a new angle to try, or a different approach that hadn’t occurred to me before. That stubborn bug? I might wake up with a fresh perspective on where to look. That new feature I was designing? Suddenly I have a clearer idea of how to structure it elegantly.

It’s like my sleeping brain becomes this background processor that can work on problems without all the noise and distractions of being awake. No email and Slack notifications, no random thoughts about what to have for lunch and dinner, no checking Mastodon every fifteen minutes. Just pure, focused problem-solving.

The price of obsession

I know this probably sounds unhealthy, and honestly, it probably is. When you love what you do, the line between work and life gets pretty blurry. I’ve been coding for over 25 years now, and somewhere along the way, programming stopped being just a job and became this integral part of how my brain works.

It’s not just complex bugs either. I’ll dream about refactoring old code, optimizing database queries, or designing new features. I’ve written entire Django models in my sleep, complete with relationships and validation logic. I’ve debugged CSS layout issues while unconscious. I’ve even dreamed about writing documentation and figuring out how to better explain a complex open source project.

I wonder sometimes if this is just what happens when you’re genuinely obsessed with something. Like how musicians probably hear melodies in their sleep, or how writers might dream entire conversations between characters. For developers, the medium of our creativity is code, so that’s what our brains default to when we’re trying to solve problems.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining about being passionate about programming. I feel incredibly lucky to have found something I genuinely love doing, something that challenges me and keeps me learning after all these years. But there’s something to be said for being able to actually switch off. I’ve tried picking up other interests over the years, I even bought an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil thinking I might get into digital art again. Spoiler alert: the Pencil is gathering dust in a drawer while I spend my evenings debugging Django middleware.

When the solution hits

There’s something pretty magical about those moments when I wake up with clarity about a problem. I’ll stumble to my laptop, still half-asleep, and start implementing the approach that dream-me figured out. Sometimes it works perfectly on the first try, which is both satisfying and slightly unsettling. Other times I need to adapt the dream-solution to work in the harsh reality of production code, but it usually points me in the right direction.

It’s made me wonder if I should be deliberately sleeping on problems more often. Like, instead of staying up until 2 AM trying to brute-force a solution, maybe I should call it quits earlier and let my unconscious mind take a crack at it. Then again, solving the problem before going to bed means there’s less chance of a restless night spent working overtime.

So if you ever wonder why your developer friends always look slightly tired, now you know. We’re not just coding during work hours – we’re coding in our dreams too. Our brains don’t have an off switch, just different power modes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some code to write. And later tonight, I’ll probably dream about refactoring it.