Morphean morphology

You know that you’re really starting to grok a language when you begin to dream in it. As opposed to merely being able to translate to and from your native tongue, your mind has learned to swim in the rhythm and harmonies of a language if you can continue that activity in the less intentional realm of dreams.

My father, who was once a Russian linguist in NSA, continued to dream in Russian often for the rest of his life. Occasionally he would even speak Russian in his sleep.

When I was in college, I was simultaneously studying Hebrew and Greek at the same time I was programming in COBOL, Algol, and Assembler (Data General Eclipse variety). That made for some bizarre sleep-talking entertainment for my roommate.

Aside: I wrote a short poem back then for a female colleague:

Life is like a COBOL program:
Skip a period and you’ve had it.

Just before the birth of my first son, an old college roommate came to visit. At the time, I was just getting down and dirty with process control programming on RSX-11M in Fortran77. Among its many limitations, RSX-11M required that installed tasks have names that were unique to three characters in order to be launched from an MCR (“Monitor Console Routine” — i.e., command) prompt. Writing new utilities required quite a bit of ingenuity to create TLA‘s that were both unique and memorable.

Anyway, to celebrate my roommate’s visit, we split a large bottle of Bacardi 151 — and neither of us were frequent drinkers. In the middle of the night, my (first) wife awakens to discover me, sitting naked at the table, holding in my hands a stuffed gorilla (a present from an earlier girlfriend) and talking to said simian in three-letter “words”.

That’s when she called the priest to inform him that should she go into labor that night, he (not I) would be accompanying her to the hospital.

Over the years, I’ve often dreamed in computer languages. From the pithy and obscure C language dreams:

*(meaning = &significance)

Does that crash? Depends on what holds significance. Then there’s the long, dreary, mantra-like liturgies of Java and C#:

public class monthlyExpenditure

(with eighteen different constructors). The occasional VB nightmare:

Set Life = Nothing

and the more recent pleasurable dreams of Ruby:

moments.each { |diem| carpe diem }

This morning I awoke a happy man. Last night I had my first dream in Lisp, with my thoughts elegantly unfolding in a parenthesized Mandelbrot set.

(defun life(means) (what (you (think it means))))

Of course, you must first define what, you, think.