Scott Varena of San Leandro, California, had a vivid dream one night. He was much older in the dream, in his early sixties, and while he was walking down the street, robots were walking alongside humans. In 2016, an eerie surprise awaited his as he opened a video on Facebook and one very specific detail precisely corresponded with his dream.
The dream itself was rather lifelike, Varena said. He could even remember many details.
“I was walking down the street like any other day, and people had these HUD like (heads-up display) things on their heads but they displayed see through screens into thin air like holograms,” he said in a comment under the Facebook video. “I think they were a very advanced version of a now days phone.”
Cars were “streamline and weird looking” (but not flying) and also bigger, perhaps enough to fit 10 people in.
“There was advertisements everywhere, some holograms and some basic paper type but would change like a TV. I ended up wondering where the hell I was and started to run but since I was older a freaking robot asked me if I needed assistance,” Varena wrote.
“I declined. But he wouldn’t leave me alone, he looked like a real person but I somehow knew he was a AI (artificial intelligence). I think it was the fact that I could hear the motors and he had all white clothes on (I think that was a uniform or something) and was a ”helper robot“.”
Varena looked to the right for a way to escape the robot and then he saw an advertisement on the wall that said: “Building a better helper. Hanson Robotics.”
He told the robot “no” again and he couldn’t remember what he was dreaming about after that. “[B]ut it was a super vivid dream,” he wrote.
The Epoch Times reached out to Varena and he confirmed he wasn’t joking and really had the dream.
Now, check out the video Varena was watching.
“Mind...
Blown....," Varena commented under the video and then added:
“I wrote this comment before I even watched the video and he freaking says ”I want them to be our helpers, to help us, to teach us.“ I seriously just got chills.”
So not only does Hanson Robotics really exist, but it specializes in developing cutting-edge robots simulating human interaction.
The company was founded in 2003 and its founder, David Hanson, has been in the news here and there for more than a decade.
Perhaps Varena saw Hanson Robotics in the news and that’s why it appeared in his dream.
Yet he said that was not the case.
“As far as I can remember, I haven’t seen any news story about Hanson Robotics until I saw this story on FB,” he told The Epoch Times.
Regardless of what Varena saw, many people don’t seem to embrace Hanson’s creations all that enthusiastically.
Browsing through the responses to the CNBC video on Facebook, virtually all the comments were negative, ranging from opinions that the robots will take peoples’ jobs, to concerns of them getting hacked or becoming conscious and ultimately destroying humanity.
