I’ve been a Programmer Analyst in several former jobs, and I always thought of that as a silly title. That’s two titles, mushed together, right? Well, I finally figured it out – of course what this really means is that I’m qualified to interpret the dreams of programmers…

Multidimensional Array
I’ll begin with a dream of my own. I was stuck in between two gigantic white parentheses. I believe that most of my time in the dream was spent trying to scale one of them, which is difficult because it’s curved inwards, and finally, after so much hard work, I landed on the other side only to face another [right] parenthesis. I was very upset because it had been so difficult to climb the first one, but then it dawned on me that perhaps if I climbed to the top and was able to see farther, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Sure enough, I discovered that I was stuck in a seemingly endless (and very difficult to climb) multidimensional array. I have outlined the stages of my comprehension here:
1. (me)
2. ()me)
3. ((())(()(((())(me))((())))))((((())))))))(((())))))))…
This interpretation is simple: I felt stuck in familiar patterns with no options.

I started asking some colleagues and friends about their own nerd dreams:

Human data
A database lover had a dream about stacking humans into closets as though she were inserting data into tables.
World domination? Nah, I think this is a desire for people to be less unpredictable.

Human object
A friend emailed me about his recurring nightmare about being a Human object running in endless circles. His greatest fear in the dream is that he will be serialized the moment he stops.
Society is trying to define him based on his accomplishments to date, but he’s ambitious and doesn’t want to be typecast.

Bully font
Finally, we have a dream with Helvetica as the main character. Helvetica was walking around with a big tattoo on its arm and basically terrorizing the neighborhood. I think there was something about Helvetica Neue being a bit of a wimp in comparison.
I don’t have much to say about this one, but it did lead us into a very enjoyable lunch conversation about font personae.

Moral of the story – talk to your nerd friends about your nerd dreams, it’s fun :)