I haven't posted one of my dreams in a while. I've been having them with the same old regularity, but my sister complained over Christmas that she hated reading them, so I stopped posting them.

I've since decided that it was a stupid decision to avoid posting them for that reason. I respect my sister, but I can't let her rule my life anymore :)

Anyway, last night's dream was interesting. It was a strange sort of surreal thing about Microsoft, which I'm sure was the product of the team meeting that's going on, my brain being jumbled from all the things that have happened recently, and the large quantity of pizza flavored Goldfish crackers that I ate before going to bed.

In this dream, I was sitting in a room with Bill Gates. We were small talking about this, that, and the other thing. I was thrilled just to be exchanging these mundane ideas with him. Very cool.

A few minutes later, he asked me if I wanted a ride home. If I was thrilled before, then I was beside myself following the invitation. The idea that Bill Gates was going to drive me home, and that I would have his attention for the duration of the drive, meaning that I could ask him question after question, had my inner geek doing the Snoopy Happy Dance, and that's even considering his rather poor track record for safe driving (he's kind of known around campus for occasionally running into other vehicles, buildings, and low-flying planes).

He disappeared, and I followed. I thought I was walking into the garage where his car was being kept, waiting and warm, but was entirely wrong.

Instead, I found myself in what looked like a waiting room. There were chairs everywhere, and about half of them were filled with other people - people of every age, race, and gender in the Homo Sapiens DNA rainbow.

I realized that Bill wasn't going to be giving me a ride home.

I waited in the room with the other people for a few minutes before being led through a set of doors into a huge, cavernous complex with ceilings so high that I couldn't see where they ended - pillars and walls faded, blended, and eventually disappeared into the darkness.

Looking away from the ceiling (or at least the direction in which I assumed the ceiling existed), I saw that there were many activities going on in this enormous room.

I suddenly understood that we, myself and all the people I was waiting with, were being tested. Bill wanted to make sure that we had what it takes to work at Microsoft.

I walked around for a while, observing people involved in different tests, before I got into a few myself.

The first was delivered to me in a book. The book itself was quite thick - probably around five-hundred pages or so, and it was filled to the brim with mental challenges.

The one I stopped on was called "Be the Needle."

Printed over many of the pages was a thick stack of squiggly lines, going from left to write, and modulating in height in what seemed like a somewhat irregular fashion.

The instructions were to "Be the needle of the phonograph."

The lines on the pages, it turns out, were the visual representation of the grooves of a record (those big black discs that were used to distribute the Bee Gees back before disco was outlawed). The job of the person being tested was to "be the phonograph needle" and attempt to visually decode the lines on the pages and determine the piece of music that had been "written" down.

To help, there was code for an application written in C, spanning about twenty pages, which was designed to decode the lines back into the sounds they represented.

That left you with one of two very difficult options:

1) Parse the lines visually

2) Parse the C app visually, run it in your head, and mentally feed it the lines on the page as input data

Neither option seemed realistic, and I started to worry that I wasn’t cut out for Microsoft. To make matters worse, that was just one puzzle of many in the book.

I chose to walk away for a little while and find a puzzle that fit my mode of thought a little better.

Came across one in which, given a few audio clues, I was supposed to infer and then recreate a particular drum rhythm.

Provided I figured out and then played the rhythm correctly, a hologram was supposed to appear before me: A woman walking down a hallway, saying something to me.

The "something" that the woman was saying was the answer to that particular test.

Then, there was a group version of that same test, and watching it was fascinating.

There were about fifty people working in tandem to play a very complicated rhythm together. They finally got it right, and the answer to their test appeared all around them in the form of holographic ghosts that were marching to the beat of their drums.

It looked tough, but it was also encouraging to see some people succeed.

In the dream, I started to think about the tests and their purpose. It was obvious that there were far too many to solve in any one person's lifetime, and even too many to solve as a team. I started to develop some strange theories.

One theory was that we weren't actually supposed to *solve* the puzzles, but rather that, by examining each one and internalizing the challenge, you could eventually see all the puzzles at once in your head, and that the simultaneous view of the *questions* somehow contained the answer. This bothered me because I knew that it was impossible given that people have 7 +/- 2 short term memory registers in which to store temporary information - they don't have the thousands which would have been necessary for the task.

So, ruling that option out as too far-fetched, I considered the possibility that the real goal was to:

1) Figure out which challenges represented a worthwhile endeavor, and which challenges were fluff that was meant to distract us

2) From that pool of worthwhile challenges, figure out which ones were realistically solvable

3) From that pool, find the ones which worked best with your personal style of thinking

4) Choose one of those challenges and go after it, kicking ass on that one thing instead of flailing around in the middle of fifty

And then I woke up.

It's interesting to note that this last analysis (targeting a problem and then going after it) just about sums up my experiences at Microsoft thus far.

Food for thought.