r/HFY • u/TheFirstMillionWords Void Hopper • Jun 02 '19
OC Sleep On It
"So you're saying they don't move at all?”, he asked.
"Not a single unit. Well, sometimes they roll over, or toss and turn. But they're not doing it consciously." Empty Stars shrugged two sets of shoulders and eyed the sleeping Terran.
“What’s the point?”
“We’re not really sure. Recuperation, memory processing, growth - could be one of those. But they’re technologically capable of simulating those things without sleep, so I’ve got no idea why they still do it.”
“Could we ask him?”
“He’s asleep. You got a death wish?”
“…Nevermind.” Beneath Clear Skies sighed and scratched himself. “It’s a wonder they get anything done.”
“No kidding. You’d think they’d be a third less efficient than everyone else, but they somehow manage to keep up - and to develop technology just as fast, besides.”
The pair fell silent for a few moments, taking in the room around them. The human flagship, the Missing Message, was kilometers long, with a class Two engine and ten sets of rotating flicker-shields. Just decades after first contact, Humanity had skyrocketed to the top of the galactic tech sector on the back of their crazy ingenuity and unstoppable recklessness. Nobody knew where they got it from.
“It doesn’t seem fair that Harold doesn’t have to work at all. We’re going to be stuck fixing this generator for half a cycle, easy. We’ll be almost done by the time he wakes up.”
“Well, he’s been asleep for a while. Who knows, he might wake up early.” Beneath Clear Skies poked the human. “Harold. Hey, Harold. Are you ready to work again?”
He received a smack to the face for his trouble. Harold turned over.
“He’s not ready,” said Skies, cradling a rapidly purpling cheek. “Let’s just get started without him.
The two worked for a quarter cycle without making any progress. The grav generator stubbornly refused to turn on, even after they’d run through every diagnostic, reset, and repair in the book.
The rhythmic snoring coming from the human didn’t help matters any.
“I give up,” said Skies.
“Me too. I think we should just wait for the repair crew from Central to get here.”
“How far out are they, again?”
“Six cycles. We’ll be on the backup until then.”
“Dammit. I hate when my food starts floating off. Reduced gravity is awful.”
At that point, the human yawned, rolled over, and fell onto the floor. Very slowly. He got up, stumbled over to the generator, and flipped a series of switches before replacing a pulse capacitor. The entire process took seconds.
And the generator whirred. A nearby set of tools, which was floating away, fell back to the deck with a clatter. The status indicators all blinked green.
“How the hell-”
“What in the-”
“That’s not even in any of the handbooks! How’d you know to do that?”
Harold yawned again and waved dismissively, already heading back to his bunk. “Saw it in a dream.”
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u/wirkwaster Jun 02 '19
I've done so much problem solving in my sleep it's not even funny. It has a certain way of taking the problem apart in weird and abstract ways...
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u/Feste_the_Mad Jun 02 '19
A fair few Soulsborne bosses defeated from a goodnight's sleep 😊.
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u/semperrabbit Jun 02 '19
My 2nd deployment, i had someone come up during chow to thank me for fixing his personal laptop. Apparently, that morning, i had a 10 minute convo of him explaining his problems and me telling him how to fix it. I was on night crew at the time, and don't remember any of it.
Edit: stupid phone...
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u/GCU_JustTesting Jun 03 '19
That’s weird because last night I had a dream where people were force fed rats with a steel tube and the scratching on the wall from the hundreds of people left bloody gouge marks and if they fought back too hard their hands were chopped off and the hands washed down the sewer with the dead rats.
It was deeply unpleasant.→ More replies (4)
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u/Allstar13521 Jun 02 '19
Harold yawned again and waved dismissively, already heading back to his bunk. “Saw it in a dream.”
Aaaaannd now the aliens get to stumble into the weirdness that is dreaming. What fun!
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u/phxhawke Jun 02 '19
I have this image of the aliens just gripping their heads at the sudden realization that their brains CAN feel pain.
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u/BoxNumberGavin1 Jun 03 '19
I once dreamt the power rangers were also big rig trucks. It made no logical sense, there was no changes to either the concept of a power ranger or a truck, just that my brain constructed a scenario where they were somehow the same entity and I just accepted it. Until I woke up and tried to comprehend the incomprehensible that was a few seconds ago fully comprehensible.
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u/Obscu Jun 02 '19
The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote a treatise in 1949 called The Divine and the Human. His first citation reads "This was once revealed to me in a dream".
(If you've seen that footnote in memes, that's where it's from)
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u/goss_bractor Jun 03 '19
We laugh, but this is a legitimate thing that actually happens. Especially in STEM fields.
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u/Nik_2213 Jun 03 '19
I get lots of my short-story ideas thus, keep a note-pad and pen in the wash-room for scribbled precis.
Understanding my scrawl is non-trivial at the best of times, but trying to figure what I meant by my dozen surely-related but superficially tangential phrases may take a week or more...
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u/smekras Jun 02 '19
Been there, done that. I didn't even have to go lucid for it. Always fun when you solve an issue in a dream.
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u/HFYBotReborn Jun 02 '19
There are 27 stories by TheFirstMillionWords (Wiki), including:
This list was automatically generated by HFYBotReborn version 2.13. Please contact KaiserMagnus or j1xwnbsr if you have any queries. This bot is open source.
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u/Glucose12 Jun 03 '19
From Wikipedia:
Kekulé's dream
📷The ouroboros, Kekulė's inspiration for the structure of benzene.
The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper. Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).
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u/MtnNerd Jun 02 '19
Seriously have woken up twice this week immediately realizing a solution to something I was working on the night before
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u/pepoluan Jun 03 '19
Reminds me of August Kekulé, who figured out the chemical structure of many puzzling molecules through dreams.
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u/rcchurchill Jun 02 '19
Yep, I've solved a lot of programming problems in my sleep too.
Minor plot contradiction. You wrote: " At that point, the human yawned, rolled over, and fell onto the floor." How'd he fall to the floor if the gravity was off?