Robot Dream

I dream a lot. Most of the time my dreams are a little odd, and often they're hilarious. I can usually figure out why I had them (I can relate them to something I was recently thinking about), but sometimes they are pretty random. I really like it when I dream about something I had completely forgotten about, or when I sometimes dream up solutions to problems in the lab (this has actually happened a couple of times!) So, at the risk of revealing the inner workings of my subconscious to everyone, I'm going to start recording some of my dreams here, mostly for entertainment value. And, since it's hard to remember what order things occurred in, I might have to put some of it in bullet format.

The first dream is one I had last night. It had something to do with the fact that I recently saw the movie Wall-E, and yesterday rated it 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix.

***

I had my own robot. It was named Wall-E and was, well, pretty much the same as the Wall-E from the movie. No eyes or facial movements, though. And I doubt it had the capacity to fall in love like the one in the movie, but I got the feeling that it was more like a dog/master relationship, where it constantly wanted to make me happy.

For example: One time I turned it on and it was low on batteries. I know this because the words on its view screen were red (instead of green), and it said that it was low on batteries. I told it (it was voice-commanded, how cool!) that I would change its batteries, and it said something to the effect of "No, I can still work." (I don't think it talked -- I probably read this on the view screen) Now that's loyalty for you. I changed the batteries anyway. They were the shape and size of camera batteries, maybe a little smaller.

Wall-E had some kind of infrared imaging system to enable it to see and maneuver around objects. Once it ran into my music stand and had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to get around it. At first I thought this was because the stem of the music stand is small, and it might be hard for it to sense the 3D nature of it. But now I'm wondering if it would be hard to get an infrared image of something that is metal (I actually have no idea what I'm talking about here).

So, what did Wall-E do? From what I can gather, it was mostly filled with information -- basically a rolling, voice-commanded Internet. With a couple little arms (maybe it could help out around the house?) and speakers. The only real task I can remember assigning it is as follows:

My mom was asked to sing at her church. She was not happy about this at all because she doesn't particularly like singing in front of people. But I think they were going to pay her for it, which made it slightly more appealing. For some reason we were in the living room at our old house (the one we lived in when I was in first grade). I wanted to help her, and I think the idea was that I would get Wall-E to play the music for the songs she needed to sing, so she could practice without anyone else around. I don't remember if she actually did it or not, but I still think it was a good idea.

Then a bunch of other stuff happened, and the plot changed to one involving a high school drama class. I don't remember much about this one, but I think this is the second time I've had a dream in reference to Hamlet 2 in as many days. And that's kind of weird, since I saw that movie a couple months ago and haven't thought about it much since (though it was pretty entertaining).

***

So, there you have it: my subconscious' relatively unimaginative vision of robots in the future.