My dream last night was very much a process oriented dream.  I had a lot of these throughout engineering school.  Basically my brain would take something that I had been studying, and analyze the crap out of it in my dream.  In this particular dream it was about Linkedin.com because I’ve been eating, sleeping, and breathing it (apparently now dreaming it too) at work.  A buddy of mine and I were able to convince our company to support Linkedin as a professional networking tool.  Sounds like a no-brainer but it was more difficult than we thought.  Anyway, suffice it to say that my brain has been in Linkedin mode for a while now.

Then, last night I went to a talk at Tufts University given by the best ice/mixed climber in the world, Will Gadd.  He’s been referred to as, “The Ice Wizard”, “The Ice Ninja”, “Professional Badass”, and the list goes on.  Check out this video of him crushing it at the Ouray Ice Festival.

I was lucky enough to have dinner with him before the talk and then the chance to have beers with him after the talk, he really is an amazing guy.  So my dream combined these two topics in my head, Linkedin.com and Will Gadd.  For what felt like the entire night I dreaming of professional networking maps of myself and Will Gadd to see where we overlapped and what connections were primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.  I had flashes of me adding him to my professional network and then introducing him to my climbing friends and vice versa.

After watching his talk I was hoping that I’d have  dream about some epic ascent, navigating dead vertical ice and rock.  Unfortunately this wasn’t the case, I had a typical engineering dream, or a process dream as I refer to them where my mind is going 1000mph on a specific topic, working through it, and ultimately not getting anywhere, waking up realizing how useless all of it sounded.