(dr) molly tov

bombs in bottles

dreaming in emacs

When I was a kid, my mother went through a deeply New Age-y phase. I am now the person who can give you an ironclad scientific argument debunking Western astrology while also drawing up your birth chart.

I also, for many years, kept a dream journal. I spent hours poring over dictionaries of dream symbols. As a kid, my dreams seemed obscure, mysterious, full of meaning.

My dreams are a lot more straightforward these days. My most recent grief-related dreams, for example, featured me begging people to understand that I have spent years hallucinating a decent life and a decent job when really something awful had happened. It doesn't take a dictionary of arcane associations to understand that one.

Last night's dreams weren't too hard to decode either. Every single one of them involved Emacs.

I've been cramming Emacs recently. I'm in love with it. I want to ask "where has this been all my life?", except the answer is "there." It's just that no one introduced me to it until recently.

I've been saying for years "what I want is a basic text editor but, like, one I can modify as needed to handle whatever type of text I am dealing with at the time." I just didn't say it to the right person until a couple weeks ago.

Cramming Emacs tutorials has had a fun side effect: I now try to run all my dreams with Emacs commands.

Last night, for instance, I had a dream I was stuck on some kind of casino spaceship. I didn't want to be there. Everyone else seemed to agree I shouldn't be there. I kept trying to C-g or Cx C-c my way out of the spaceship, but for some reason, it never worked. (In hindsight, perhaps C-z was the correct answer?)

Later in the dream, I was trying to keep track of a bunch of inventory I'd shelved. I kept trying to bind shortcut keys to each item, so I could just respawn things if someone walked off with them. My dream-brain kept saying to itself that this would work because "everything is a file." (GNU's not Unix, but my dreams are.)

I don't need a dream dictionary to interpret this. If I did, though, I'm sure I could build one in Emacs.

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