Dreams - Part 1

Here, I am not talking about the ambitions or goals. I am talking about the real dreams we see when we are asleep. To be honest, most of the times, I end up forgetting my dreams, when I wake up.

However, there are dreams that will never slip out of my mind. Whenever a problem runs deep within, and I am unable to solve it for a few days and it keeps troubling me, the solution appears in my dream. This has happened several times and I will talk about one such instance here.

Ping Fails!

Many years ago, when I was an entry level automation engineer, I joined a new team with not many seniors, who could help me technically. I was good at scripting and automation, but not familiar with networking. After writing all my scripts, I saw that there were a few failed test cases due to the ping failure to a server. I explained my problem statement, to as many people as possible including my mother :).  All of them gave me emotional support, but my journey was lonely. It was me and my problem and there was no body else in that world. I had sleepless nights sitting alone with my problem. One night, when I happened to sleep, I dreamt of getting lost on my way home. I called someone to ask for the 'route' to reach home (I have called my husband several times in real life asking for the route after getting lost, and I still do it. Lol).

The Route

When I woke up, I could recollect each and every thing that happened in my dream. I felt like somebody hit my head hard with a strong hammer and said the word "Route". I got up and shouted, "Perhaps, the ICMP packets lost their way to the destination server, because they did not know the 'route'." ; thereby waking up my husband who was terrified (lol). I ran to my computer and connected to the VPN. Working from home was not common those days. My husband was wondering what I was upto, during such early hours, even without brushing my teeth :). With the little knowledge I had about networking and lots of research on the internet, I found that the "route" to the destination server was deleted by a script that caused the issue. When I added that route, 'ping' succeeded. I was on cloud nine. I did not invent anything new. I was not going to get a 'Nobel Prize' for this. But it was definitely my small 'Eureka' moment. 

Eureka Moments

Perhaps, we all have felt our own small Eureka moments resulting from our dreams. When I think about it, this doesn't happen every time. It happens only when a problem enters deep into our subconscious mind, that it tries to fetch the data from some where within and gives it to us through our dreams.

Has the data always been there, deep within and we had missed to pick it up, that it comes out through our dreams? Or is the universe conspiring to bring the data to us because of the strong intensity of our thought? I do not know. But it definitely feels good.