#but is an anagram of ADD (attention deficit disorder)

[liskantope]

Woke up (a little too early) this morning from a light dream in which I was in a psychiatrist's office taking some kind of ADHD diagnostic test on a computer screen. I had to type some long sequences of character strings showing on the screen as fast as I could while the examiner was watching and taking notes. They involved a lot of non-letters and uses of the shift key, and it was all realistic enough that I was going through something close to the actual mental process of finding the keys on the keyboard but it was taking me if anything perhaps a little longer than it would in real life.

I reached a point in the exercise where the next string of characters was (D)(A)(D) and I was holding the shift key down with one finger while finding the appropriate keys with the other when I woke up enough to vaguely notice that I was lying in bed. Rather than properly realize that had been a dream and now I was partly awake, I said to myself, "No, now I'm getting distracted and have stopped typing, better get back to this or the examiner will notice I'm spacing out and mark me down." I was unable to get back to the dream state, but I started thinking, "I could have saved time by typing '(DAD)' instead of '(D)(A)(D)' because the two parentheses signs are inverses and cancel each other out when next to each other" (in other words, I was thinking of conjugation in group theory or matrix algebra). It wasn't until several minutes later that I fully realized the examination had all been a dream and that I didn't have to think about it anymore.