Yes, it seems I have to be perpetually addicted to at least one thing at any one point in my life. Right now its coding, which really doesn’t rate that bad on the scale of things.
I get the same thing… I become obsessed with a single skill. First it was freestyle nun-chucks, then guitar, now programming. I literally would spend 8 hour sessions without stop doing it, and guitar and nun-chucks I have become exceptional at. Often now I program for like 6 hours, and suddenly realise I don’t know what day it is, where I am, what my schedule is for the next few days. I don’t even know who is in the house with me, it’s a weird feeling.
I can’t say I’ve ever lost a day, but maybe about ten hours. I was playing Minecraft at 10PM and I thought to myself ‘Time to go to bed now’, 8AM next morning… WTF?!
I am a composer for film and guitarist for many years now. I did the same thing with playing the guitar but nothing seems to make you lose track of reality quite like a coding binge.
I think we can all testify to this happening at least once in our lives 
Either playing a good game or being involved in a deep and satisfying conversation, time seems to go in hyperspeed 
I’ve had it recently while playing Skyrim. The game is not as good as it is hyped to be (waaaaay too easy), but it is so darned beautiful I played it for nearly 8 hours straight the first day without even realizing it.
sometimes if i listen to techno music while programming i’ll go into a trance. then i’ll end up with a working program. half the time i won’t be able to figure out how i got it to work.
The more dangerous problem is when you’re programming while driving. You’re following the same road you do everyday, and you remember working over a problem in your head, perhaps bits of the scenery that popped up when you identified a good idea or mistake, but the rest of the way is just thoughts about the problem.
And you know that you did at least sixty the whole way back. That you survived. And that you have no clue what happened on the road between leaving and arriving.
you program while you drive? i’m staying away from you on the highway. :persecutioncomplex:
[quote]Or, days become measured in the number of times you ran your code and it did what you expected. Those become the milestones of your life, instead of those rather infrequent attempts to steal time to sleep from fingers and brain that still feel the need to lay out lines of code.
Dear lord, I’ve had FSM enter my dreams.
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the flying spaghetti monster?
I’ve never had strange dreams after coding, but i do when i haven’t programmed in a while. I had one in which i was the guy in DOOM. the original, 320x200 256 color doom. the final boss was some sort flaming rabbit from hell with laserbeam eyes, and there was some sort of weapon that resembled the life leach from BLOOD. the funny thing was, i had never played blood yet. are these things some sort of geek racial memory?
Well, about 90% of the time where I drive, I’m alone on the road going down the high way. And it’s a route I’ve driven several hundred times over the last few years. So it’s like muscle memory now. xD
And no, Finite State Machine. It wasn’t fun. I woke up more exhausted than when I went to bed.
And nope, I don’t have any dreams around those games. I just have terrible Resident Evil + Fever Hallucination induced nightmares. xD
Oh dear god…
I’ve never dreamt about code, but I fall asleep thinking about it all the time. You guys take it to a whole 'nother level though, haha.
so i suppose we’re coding zealots. there are worse things to be fanatical about.
On worst nights I have fully functional glsl compiler in my head when I sleep.