Yet another one of "those" dreams. Short on detail because this should have been posted twelve hours ago.

I carried out the meanest sort of manual labor, in what must have been a grocery store - or perhaps a warehouse, considering the cavernous freezers and total absence of customers. A pair of women slowly patrolled the place, possibly taking inventory; one of them regularly gave me rude, meaningless orders. These would typically involve tasks such as locating a certain can, with a specific serial number, and nudging it a few centimeters to the right.

Eventually my tormentor decided that I was not quick enough on my feet, or that cans have not been nudged in quite the right direction, or some-such - and remarked to her partner that I ought to be punished. She unfolded her ever-present laptop, where Emacs - a beautifully colored, smooth-fonted Emacs - was running; she then remarked that an algorithm for docking my salary in exact proportion to my misdeeds must be devised. At this point no one cared to stop me from moving closer, and my eyes became firmly glued to the screen. My fate was to be decided by a few hundred lines of Common Lisp - and what a marvelous lisper was at the keyboard! In what could not have been more than a dozen keystrokes, screens-full of elegant (and perfectly comprehensible at the time) code appeared. I ceased to care about the ultimate purpose of the program, and stood drooling stupidly at the brain-liquefying beauty of it, the techniques which allowed it to be entered in such a way, and its author.

Then Big Bad Things happened, but I don't remember precisely what sorts.