Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Interrupted sleep due to a dream that crossed the "I need to wake up to make sense of this" threshold. I did get back to sleep again afterward for a couple more hours.

In the dream, I had registered as a student at a performing-arts college, expecting to take classes in several vocal styles, several dance styles, learn several more instruments and musical genres ... and at some point I got picked to demonstrate lineman techniques in a class on American football.

Before that point, some fellow students and I discovered that one of our professors had set up a secret laboratory in a section of a building that the administration thought wasn't being used.

In the football class, two women were picked to portray the center and quarterback, and the professor chose me to be a defensive lineman and show them the various ways I could stop them so they could later learn countermoves. The three of us set up in the aisle of the auditorum and ran several 'plays'. I showed various tricks I could use, and pretty much ran over them, occasionally stopping to explain what I'd done and how to see a particular move coming. The one playing center was cute in that "Hollywood would cast her to portray 'the fat girl' but in real life she wouldn't even count as 'pudgy'" way, and she felt really really nice in my arms a couple of times (moves which I didn't realize until after waking up, that I would have gotten a holding penalty for). Then suddenly she fell down and appeared to be sick or injured, but we couldn't figure out what was wrong.

In attempting to help her, we finally discovered that she was a machine, a gynoid (I don't want to say 'robot' because the difference in nuance between 'robot' and 'android' come into play; and I don't want to say 'android' because 'andr-' relates to maleness). And some part of her mechanism was damaged internally. Now for some reason the professor had vanished by this time, but we guessed that since she had a secret lab she may have been the one who built the gynoid student, and we went looking for her. We found her in her lab, talking to somebody else, and she examined her creation and pronounced that unfortunately there was nothing she could do; the gynoid was dying.

I felt responsible, so I tried to make her as comfortable as possible and asked whether there was anything she wanted to do in her last moments. At some point along the way she lost her legs and arms, so it became possible for me to carry her just by myself, and I was hauling her to and fro around campus. She said that she wanted to visit the top of the Empire State Building (at which point I suddenly realized the college was in NYC), and I went to my dorm to grab a jacket and ask friends if they wanted to come along. Various people I've known since university in real life were in the dream, even though many of them went to different schools than I did.

I woke up when I realized that although I should've known how to get from school to the Empire State Building on mass transit in the dream, I hadn't a clue in real life so my brain couldn't fill in convincing details for the dream.

Then I pondered the significance of having a class in American football at a performing arts college, until I fell asleep again.