Skewed Reality

I wake up every weekend day at noon - regardless of how early or late I slept the night before - without fail. As if all the fatigue accumulated during the week days only start to take effect during the weekends. So I make up for the lost rest I needed during the weekdays.

But despite sleeping for long hours, I don't sleep well. Concepts of XML, parent-child relationships (database tables), hierarchy nodes, data structures, play around in my mind even as I sleep.

Imagine dreaming. Then imagine designing and problem solving a computer system. Imagine your brain doing all of that at the same time. Its almost like having a fever, the kind that makes you think/imagine crazy things as you sleep. Like how to take over the world of tooth-fairies using mathematics.

Except that with a fever, once you wake up, you realise the absurdity of the ideas you had in your mental spiel, and forget all about it.

Waking up from a dream (or nightmare) of systems design is like waking up with a hangover; the effect lingers in your head. It doesn't make you feel dizzy. It doesn't make you feel nauseous. But you start to see everything. . . . . .differently. You start to look at things, but you don't see it for what it is. You don't "know" (in a loose definition of the word) what the heck it is you're looking at. Almost as if your mind had split into two. And whatever you perceive goes into these two minds to be processed, and you end up with a jumbled up interpretation. You end up living in something of a virtual reality. Like "the Matrix". But its not virtual; its real. You're just reading the world differently; looking at it through a filter - a filter of rules, data structures, their attributes, and their relationships, all of which cannot fully represent any real world entities.

You end up living in a skewed reality, and you hope to high heaven, that the filter isn't permanent.