Blurring the Line

"I hate listening to people's dreams. It is like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I'm not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don't care."

Despite what Dennis from It's Always Sunny says, I'm going to tell you guys about two episodes from last night. I'm not really sure if you'd even call these dreams... they kind of blur the line of dreaming and being awake.

1) I wake up suddenly in my bed pumped full of adrenaline and terror. The room is very dark, but I can clearly see movement on both my left and right. As I sit with my back up against the wall, unable to move or speak, the movements resolve into three distinct people. They simply stand there, faces dark and indistinct, but they continue to shift around and watch me. When I can take it no longer, I lunge over to my nightstand to turn on the light. As soon as the light comes on the watchers instantly become familiar objects in my room, a chair and closet doors.

2) I'm having a dream where I am in a room with about 10 other people. Someone cries out and collapses after being bitten by a spider the size of my hand. The orange and black spider scurries around the room and we all begin to chase it to try to kill it before it gets anyone else. I finally corner him and try to smash him with a stick. At the very moment of the deathblow I suddenly find myself standing in my room next to my bed, again filled with terror. I feel something crawling on my arm and look down to see the spider climbing up towards my hand. With a cry I reach out with my other hand and turn on the light. Again, the moment the light comes on the spider disappears, leaving me standing alone in my room.

What the hell is going on here?! Waking up and imagining people and things in the darkness is something that happens to me often enough. But this has to be the first time something from one of my dreams has followed me into the real world... Any sleep-experts know what to call these?

Reading Code

These days I've been reading a lot of source code, and it can get pretty miserable if the code isn't well commented or if it isn't properly formatted.

It's a time-honored tradition (or requirement) to indent code so that you can see when statements are nested. This is ok, but for long documents where the nesting statements can stretch for pages and pages this can be inadequate. I feel like a good IDE must have a way of telling at a glance how deep you are.

I'm sure there are lots of tricks out there, but has anyone thought of displaying the nesting level in a 3rd dimension or colormap? For example, a line of code that looks further away than its neighbors would be clearly on a different nesting level, and you'd be able to instantly grasp the structure of the code you're looking at.

Am I crazy? Someone with more experience please tell me your secrets. (I'm looking at you Paul).

Thunderstorms are even sweeter when you're watching them from a skyscraper with big windows.

Ping.fm is pretty sweet!