The Schrödinger wave functional ψ = exp −S{A a i ( x)} for the d = 3+1 QCD vacuum is a partition function constructed in d = 4; the exponent 2S [in |ψ| 2 = exp(−2S)] plays the role of a d = 3 Euclidean action. We start from a simple conjecture for S based on dynamical generation of a gluon mass M in d = 4, then use earlier techniques of the author to extend (in principle) the conjectured form to full non-Abelian gauge invariance. We argue that the exact leading term, of O(M ), in an expansion of S in inverse powers of M is a d = 3 gauge-invariant mass term (gauged non-linear sigma model); the next leading term, of O(1/M ), is a conventional Yang-Mills action. The d = 3 action that is (twice) the sum of these two terms has center vortices as classical solutions. The d = 3 gluon mass m3, which we constrain to be the same as M , and d = 3 coupling g 2 3 are related through the conjecture to the d = 4 coupling strength, but at the same time the dimensionless ratio m3/g 2 3 can be estimated from d = 3 dynamics. This allows us to estimate the d = 4 coupling αs(M 2 ) in terms of the strictly d = 3 ratio m3/g 2 3 ; we find a value of about 0.4, in good agreement with an earlier theoretical value but somewhat low compared to the QCD phenomenological value of 0.7 ± 0.3. The wave functional for d = 2 + 1 QCD has an exponent that is a d = 2 infrared-effective action having both the gauge-invariant mass term and the field strength squared term, and so differs from the conventional QCD action in two dimensions, which has no mass term. This conventional d = 2 QCD would lead in d = 3 to confinement of all color-group representations. But with the mass term (again leading to center vortices), only N -ality ≡ 0 mod N representations can be confined (for gauge group SU (N )), as expected.