Thursday, November 17, 2011

Dream: What is Fibonacci?


This dream actually occurred a couple of nights ago, and its details have already faded away from my memory. However, I find the content of it to be quite significant, so I want to make sure that I record it before it is completely gone from my mind.
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So in the dream, I was tutoring another child  with math. And for some reason, I was trying to teach him/her how to find the terms in a Fibonacci sequence. The child didn't really understand what a Fibonacci sequence was, though, and kept thinking that certain numbers— such as 17— were Fibonacci numbers.

I tried to explain to him/her how to obtain a Fibonacci number, and when that didn't work, I attempted to list the first ten Fibonacci numbers so that he/she could see the trend. However, I couldn't! All I could say was 5, 13, 5, 13... For some reason my mind just blanked away and I couldn't think of all the other numbers in the sequence! And after thinking very hard, I (as in my actual self, not myself in the dream) still couldn't come up with the correct sequence of numbers.

This lasted for some indefinite amount of time, until I finally woke up— horrified. Fortunately, when I frantically tried to remember the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34..., I found that the task required no effort at all. So apparently the intellectual inaptness was only present during my sleep.