Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Thanks for the kind responses to what I wrote about my dad underneath yesterday's QotD.

Feeling terribly sluggish today; still trying to really get myself moving. Not coping at all well with loud noises, but at least it's not one of those days when even moderate noises sound loud.

Odd dream this morning ... I was taken hostage by a spy and transported out of the country by plane; for some reason I was carrying firearms at the time (in real life, I do not), and those got stored in a locker at the airport. Later, I was brought back via the same airport, managed to escape via a ruse at the baggage claim, retrieved my pistols from the locker, and fled the building. But just outside the airport's parking garage, I saw spies about to kill a woman, so I shot at them to try to rescue her, and wound up in a protracted firefight involving two different groups of foreign spies, two US intelligence/LE agencies, and at least one group of random terrorists, during which I fell in with a woman from the CIA who rescued me when I was pinned down, afraid of wasting my few bullets (I started with ten -- six in one pistol and four in the other -- and was down to three by then) and wishing that I'd ever gotten to a range and actually learned to shoot, since the first shot in the dream was the first time I'd ever fired a gun. (My first two shots with the .32 went wide, then I switched to the .44 and hit my next three targets (I'm betting that this is an unrealistic success rate for a novice facing moving targets and return fire (and near-paralyzing fear)) I don't think I ever did hit anyone with the .32 .. oh, and the bullets all moved just slowly enough that my eyes could follow the flight and see a little curve to the path, which I started to compensate for with the .44 -- it wasn't that the entire scene was in slow-motion, just that the bullets moved that slowly.) In the dream, the guns had no recoil, and despite using black-powder^[1] they didn't emit Huge Clouds Of Smoke to give away my position, but when the CIA agent took me to her hotel room to re-arm, she did look shocked when she realized that one of my weapons was a muzzle-loader. (She asked what kind of ammo I needed for the .44, and I said, "Minié balls -- I think I still have enough powder back in my room. But I may need some help working the ramrod-lever.") Everyone else in the firefight had been using semiautomatic weapons; mine were the only revolvers. When I woke up, or sort of half-woke, I was thinking that gosh, maybe there's an advantage to semiautomatics after all.

I was also thinking, in that not-quite-awake post-dream state where there's more logic and realism than the dream but the mind still goes off in odd directions, about whether the advantage of modern semiautomatics over antique revolvers was something I should really worry about. I decided that my being in an action movie, however improbable, was more likely than my ever being in a thirty-minute gun battle in real life, so I'd probably be able to leave the choice of weapon to the prop manager and let the number of bullets be a continuity problem for the writer and director instead of being my problem. This line of thought seemed to make perfect sense at the time.

[1] As opposed to the modern "smokeless" powder that's been popular for, uh, about a century now, I think.