Seeing Clear:Left in Your Dreams

With a full-time job and a handful of personal projects on the side, I find myself doing a lot of design and coding at night (of the html and css variety). However, lately I've been noticing a disturbing side effect start to develop. Code is starting to appear in my dreams. And not in a cool "Matrix-y" way either.

In ways that make absolutely no sense.

For example, I spent a fair amount of time yesterday putting together a site layout. I keep changing the overall structure, and playing with colors and borders. Last night, I had this dream I was in an old country house somewhere in New England. I was in the kitchen, which had big windows with sunlight pouring in. I remember thinking myself that it was too bight in the kitchen, and that I should adjust the hex colors. (In my dream, that made sense at the time). Then, as I was walking through the house, in and out of different rooms, I was thinking I should put a border or background color around these rooms, to help distinguish them from one another.

When I woke up, I was a bit confused by it, and even a bit ashamed that I am such a nerd as to dream about stuff like this. The more I thought about it, I started the see why my brain was acting this way. I had spent time thinking about the use of space and how areas relate to one another. My dream was basically about the same thing.

I spoke to someone else about this, a database developer, and he mentioned he notices the same thing. He went a step further and said how being a developer can also affect his thinking when he's awake, how he finds himself thinking about how things in the real-world relate to one another.

It then made me think about how/if other creative people experience this. How does coding or graphic design or painting or film editing affect your brain, both awake and asleep. If anyone has funny/odd/interesting examples to share, feel free to leave a comment.