Dream - The robot box with the girl face

On March 13, 2009 I had a dream about working late and accidentally activating a mechanical thing like a large ladybug, and a little later meeting a robot box with a girl face.

In the dream, I was at work somewhere. It was a continuation of the work in Nevada, but at somewhere else. Ir was getting late. My mother came and wanted me to leave. I finally decided to and she went out to the car to wait.

In the place where I worked there was a broad paved parking area by the building and beyond that a tall wire fence. I'm not sure if it was chain link or not. The building was dark in color and low and very large. I was in a room about the size of a large living room. It had a low dense carpet. It was mostly empty but had some things around the sides of it. It had an opening to a hallway on one side, the right side when facing the parking lot, and windows along the side by the parking lot. It also had an opening to another room halfway along the wall on the side away from the parking lot. The other wall was along the outside of the building. There were at least two workstations along the wall away from the parking lot.

I was looking around, seeing what I needed to do to close up before leaving. It was Friday and approaching 9:00 PM now, though it was still light outside. I remembered I was still logged in on a computer and needed to log out and shut it down. It would be bad to have people come in in the morning and find it still on with me logged in. I also needed to find my time card and fill it out before I left. The Engineering boss hadn't liked me working so late, and probably wouldn't be happy to see the time on it, if he happened to notice it. After considering it for a while, I decided that it didn't really matter. I was making trips here from Arizona to work now long after I had quit, and probably wasn't getting paid for it and probably didn't even have a time card anyway.

I went to the workstation to try to log out. I had been using both of them but the one toward the hallway, on the other side of the opening to the other room, was already shut down.

Working at the one that was still on, I saw that it had a view of a small boat speeding along on some mission, with the viewpoint being a little bit behind the boat and up in the air a bit. It was a movie camera taking a picture of a real boat, but sometimes it seemed to degenerate into some kind of video game.

I kept trying to type "logout" but now I had gotten very tired and it was hard to see, hard to keep my eyes open and hard to do anything, and I was having trouble finding all the letters. The screen was fairly high up, and below it there was a small square keypad with not many letters, and a lot of them were numbers, and a ways below that another keypad, more rectangular but still very small, and below that, on the desk surface, the almost forgotten normal keyboard. I kept getting confused and having to start over partway through, typing a zero instead of an "o" or some other mistake. I thought there was probably a logout link somewhere on the screen if I could find it, but it seemed a lot of work to look for it right now.

One time I typed it with a mistake and accidentally pressed Enter instead of backspacing it all away, and it turned out to be an actual command for something and some device was activated. It was about a foot long and looked something like a giant ladybug, but it was much more subdued in its colors, being gray and light gray green. It flew around fiercely out by the boat.

Some other people came in from the hallway, and I was momentarily distracted and got confused, then woke up some (in the dream) and the giant ladybug-like thing was in the room, up on the broad post that the monitor and the two small keypads were mounted on. It moved around some but much less than it had been doing. It might have been around the size of a fist, more with the wings spread. I think the people who came in were part of a later shift, one that overlapped mine, and actually worked somewhere else but came in here for some reason. I think I finally managed to log out. I think I managed to somehow shut the little machine off too, and went into the other room through the door near my computer.

The other room was more dimly lit and had a concrete floor, and was filled with things, various equipment and tools and stuff. Some people came in from another way, from the side that was an outer wall on the previous room but seemed to lead to some other rooms from this one. One was a man who had evidently been working on an old small cellular radiator for most of the day, and still hadn't gotten it fixed. He hooked up or maybe just stuck an air hose in one end and turned it on, and air of course shot out of all the openings, but also from a place in the middle on the other side.

He was complaining in despair, "Oh, no...." and turned it over, showing it to me while he looked at it himself. It had a big rust-stained area on the core, but I saw no evidence of soldering or of work of any kind, except for some scrape marks where he had been poking a screwdriver into it. I looked at it doubtfully, my eyes a little big, and started to say something about it. "You want to work on it?!" or maybe "You want to fix it?!" he demanded, but at the same time a little hopefully.

I thought about it for a couple of seconds, thinking that I possibly could but really didn't want to, and then picturing fumes from the flux coating my face again and really didn't want to do this again and said, "Uhhhhh..... no..."

He turned back to it, seemingly satisfied that an answer had been given, but somewhat grimmer because it wasn't the answer he had hoped for, even if it had been only a little hope.

There was a square rack in the room near the opening to the hallway. It was a couple of feet on a side, with a series of long metal hooks sticking out of each side near the top, with things in wide partially clear plastic bags hung on them. Some of the hooks also had cardboard pouches that opened up accordion style, like some briefcases, with small clear bags stuck in them. I had been looking through some of the stuff there when the men came in, and the man with the radiator. It seemed to be mostly stuff purchased in various department or discount stores by various people, perhaps some of it as gifts. Now I went back to looking through the things on it.

People occasionally went by in the broad nearby hallway. I thought about the people who had worked here for a long time, and about one of them that I had known since high school, maybe even grade school (in real life, the only such person might have been someone from DeVry. a college). We had had some kind of disagreement several years ago, and were no longer friendly with each other. It seemed very sad.

Suddenly, a dull, light gray metal box rolled up and asked in a soft female voice what I was doing. It was about three feet high, with various intricate little things attached to it at various places, and a gray metal face high in the middle of one side. The face was sheet metal and was somewhat smaller than a real face, and shallower, like a Halloween mask. It had sheet metal formed into a vague representation of hair around the top and sides of the face. It also had skinny arms at the top corners of the box, composed of rods and cables, and grasping appendages on the ends of the arms that were like two narrow triangles hinged together at their bases. It may have had two more arms at the back top corners, but I'm not sure now.

I think the other people had moved on now, or had moved off a little ways and I was no longer directly concerned with them.

I looked at the robot thing. It had spoken with a little bit of authority in its voice, like it was in fact demanding, in its soft way, if I had the authority to do what I had been doing. Its face was bland and expressionless, and it had gray featureless eyes.

I talked to it a bit and it explained a little about itself, though I think part of the knowledge simply flowed into me independently, just a knowing. She was something that had been built as some kind of special project, and had an advanced artificial intelligence. She said she had also been changed at some point so she could make her face look human, and I think had competed in some kind of beauty contest.

She then demonstrated, and her gray sheet metal face faded into an entirely human female face, complete with makeup and real-looking hair. The face was still a little smaller than normal but looked astonishingly real, and was capable of movement. Even the eyes moved. Her voice became a little louder and took on more expression, too.

I talked with her a while, and then one of the inventors came in and talked a bit. At one point the inventor said to me, "You know what she is", apparently cautioning me to remember that it was really a machine with an advanced program.

I said "Yeah...... but it doesn't make any difference." I turned and looked down at the robot and said, "You're very pretty" and she beamed and blushed.


When I woke up, the dream quickly faded and I looked at the time and was surprised. It didn't seem that I had been asleep at all. I had been trying to sleep and having some difficulty, but a lot of time had evidently passed and I was puzzled as to where it went. Then some of the dream came back to me, just a little. Much more came later, especially as I typed it down.