Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Odd night. After the dreams of stories of Noah, Abraham, and Lot with people I knew playing the lead roles, I had a couple of strange dreams. One was an Extremely Vivid dream of playing Olympic one-on-one stair-hockey against Wayne Gretzky. Stair-hockey, it turns out, is played -- in ice skates, of course -- on a long, steep, narrow, snow-covered, wooden staircase, using ice-hockey sticks. Getting the stick under the puck to loft it up the stairs was a challenge. I was defending the downstairs goal, and Gretzky defended the upstairs goal. I got past him with a lucky break after the puck had gotten caught in some sort of vine (morning glory, perhaps) growing at the edge of the stair, and sprinted up the stairs, and when the dream ended (I'm not sure whether it was the end of the first half -- background dream-knowledge included the idea that games were two periods long, not three -- or the end of the game) I was ahead one-nothing.

After I woke up enough to tell myself I needed to post that dream here later, I fell asleep again and dreamt that I was in a military classroom learning about orbital combat. Oddly enough, the professor started off by comparing it to stair hockey with a really long staircase, before going on to explain that it was nothing at all like stair hockey. More importantly, the differences between orbital, atmospheric, and interplanetary combat were discussed, and much was made of the sensor blackout period when one ship manages to get far enough from the other to loop around the planet (one ship in a high, slow orbit, perhaps geostationary, and the other in a low, fast orbit). Orbital mechanics lets the enemy predict where you'll reappear if you do not expend any fuel, so the focus was on tactics to decide what course changes to make during the blackout period whether you were in the low ship or the high ship, and approaches to being able to target and fire your weapons as quickly as possible once contact was reestablished. Unlike movie space combat, fuel was considered precious (not because of its expense; simply because you couldn't possibly carry as much as you really wanted to. The professor did point out that if the enemy had a network of satellites that could observe your position and relay it around the planet, it was a completely different ball game.

Then leg pain/cramps woke me up, but I was too groggy to log in until now.