I'm not sure if this should go in the RinkDream thread or the Computer Geek Slips thread. I had a very geeky dream about RinkWorks. AND I dreamt about actual letters and words that I could read, so it touches upon that issue, too.

I dreamt that I was playing Project X. Not writing, playing. I was sitting on my sofa, playing it on my laptop, except what appeared on the screen was that 279x192 green screen display from the old Apple IIe that I grew up hacking on. I even had the blocky, 40 characters per line font visualized correctly.

So I was playing Project X, and I noticed a bug. It was a misspelling. I had forgotten the 'y' in "ELLMRUH." (It was all-caps, of course, because that's what we used back in Apple II days.) Interestingly, this was the name of a race of people, not an individual, as in "The Ellmyruh." I think I know why I had this idea: as my mind was drifting off to sleep last night, I remembered the one episode of Lexx I've seen thus far, and was thinking about how "The Brunnen-G" are a race of people. At any rate, the misspelled word "ELLMRUH" was very clearly visualized in my head. I wasn't seeing the "impression" of the word but the physical construct itself. I corrected the text file which contained the misspelling, which was not easy, because on the Apple II, using DOS 3.3 and Applesoft Basic, it was not easy to just edit a text file (filetype 'T') because text files were used by programs (in this case, filetype 'A', for Applesoft Basic) rather than for humans to read. But I edited the data file and inserted a 'Y' into "ELLMRUH," and then did a search (anachronism; I never worked on any DOS 3.3 text file editor, let alone one with a search feature) for "MRUH" to make sure the misspelling didn't recur elsewhere. Except the right half of my brain was starting to evolve the spelling, and I think I ended up searching for "YYRUH" and "YLLRUH" and it was starting to get difficult to remember to visualize the "RUH" suffix. However, something left brained must have worked, because those searches came back with nothing -- not even the occurrence of "ELLMYRUH" that I had just corrected, by which I knew, in the dream, that I was screwing up the spelling somehow. Around this time, something screwed up with the computer, and I had to reboot, and when I got it back, my saved file, while still containing the data for the saved game, had corrupted itself, and there was one number (a count) that was reset to 0, the consequence being that the program wouldn't read in the rest of the actual data. Whether you understand what I'm saying or not, the important thing to get is that this was pretty accurate to the real Project X save files -- if a count were to be screwed up somehow, the symptoms would be similar. Yet I had not before last night's dream considered that possibility, and, in fact, within the dream I was considering how I might have the program try to detect such save file corruption and auto-salvage what it could. Now that I'm awake, I realize that that won't be necessary, but the fact that it was a possible point of failure, the fact that I considered rational solutions, and the fact that my image of the save file (on that 40-column all-caps green screen) was pretty accurate, is a very weird thing.

This is probably the most left-brained dream I've ever had. The hint of right-brainedness came in when I started having difficulty knowing what substring to search for. But I very clearly visualized words and each of the letters that made them up, and they did not evolve over the course of the dream. I encountered a bug that was pretty complex and technical and accurate to real life, and I went about solving it in a rational way. And I haven't even looked at Project X in months.

Dreams that aren't bizarre are bizarre.