A dream I had in May 2007.

My brother and I traveled to an elaborate, high-concept science museum, much like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, but this one was built into the side of a mountain. It was enormous. A man wealthy beyond anyone’s dreams had built it, and had been dead now for several years. In fact, the whole museum gave the impression of being completely automated — there didn’t seem to be any staff.

I walked past multi-colored glass displays of various eels and lizards, crawling over bins of some shoestring-like food. I had never seen animals like this before. The building itself on the inside was studded with kiosks of all kinds, at which you could play science and math games. The architecture was like the San Diego Convention Center, all flying beams and huge round glass portals, some looking out onto the mountainside, and some looking into huge tanks of water full of sea life.

I wandered over to a bank of kiosks, one of which resembled a kid’s school desk set into an arcade cabinet, complete with monitor and some kind of three-foot-in-diameter pad beside it. There was no input device in the kiosk — just a jar with an odd red pen or pencil, and sheets of paper that had been treated to look like mini-chalkboards. The game started when I sat down at the desk: it was a science fact quiz game.