I had a really amazing lucid dream early this morning. I actually thought it might be real while it was happening. I seemed to be watching a news report about a new experimental aircraft and they showed a video of it taking off. Like a vertical take-off-and-landing vehicle, it didn't need a runway. All you could see was an empty football field at first.

You know how stingrays bury themselves in the sandy sea bed so they can't be seen and then flap their "wings" to rise up majestically? Well, in my dream a huge crablike aircraft struggled to rise out of the floor of the football field on vertical jets, first one leg of its score of legs rising then another. It resembled a steam punk monster that Jules Verne might have imagined, and must have been controlled by scores of programmed servo-mechanisms desperately avoiding feedback loops. It slowly struggled up into the air, each leg rising and falling, almost crashing into the ground. It flapped upwards and then almost crashed, recovered again and almost crashed again, drifting back and forth like an unstable pendulum. It displayed the aerodynamic instabilities of a dying jellyfish struggling to stay aloft. It was so exciting that I almost thought I was seeing it in person and, therefore, in danger.

For some reason, science fiction authors have always liked to assume that the technology of anti-gravity was immanent. Pulp magazine covers routinely show aircraft hovering in the clouds without any means of support. Flying saucers always slow down and stop in mid-air without any visible propulsion mechanism keeping them afloat. The idea is thrilling and very appealing, even though we've had billions of years to get used to being bound by "up" and "down". I dream about anti-grav airships a lot.

The reason I'm calling this a lucid dream is because, like most of my dreams, I experienced it in as much detail and vividness as I do the real world. I've come to believe that the difference between my dreams and my reality is not so much that dreams are blurry, two-dimensional, black and white hazy snapshots as are usually thought, but only remembered that way because the brain has learned over millions of years that they are not reality and therefore not worth remembering. They also suffer from "change blindness" — when your focus shifts and you look back again, don't count on what you were looking at being exactly the same as it was a second ago!

Maybe in a hundred years or so, if we ever get to an age of useful and safe psychedelics, we'll also figure out how to remember our dreams better, as a new form of recreation. There might be a whole new world to explore inside of us just as exciting and absorbing as Gothic novels used to be or as blockbuster movies are now, and probably more so.