Strange dream last night. I was on a spaceship so large it had geography. It had a sky. I could look into the distance and see bluffs and trees and mountains.

I was told I was not on a planet or inside a space habitat, but a landscape on the flat surface of a gargantuan spaceship.

Suddenly I realized I had a job to do. I tried to find my work space. I opened a drawer that appeared to be in my childhood dresser. It was empty except for a smashed orange with white fuzzy tendrils coming out of it.

The seeds were beginning to sprout. I wanted to plant it.

My coworkers were talking about something we needed to do. It occurs to me it was in the newsroom at a place I used to work. They said we needed to talk to “the queen.” We needed to ask her permission to do something.

Not sure who the queen was. I just accepted it. I went outside, where I saw the sky and the mountains in the distance. I saw a lady with a contingent of people around her. I didn’t get a sense of her personality, just that she seemed confident.

I was told she had the ability to “turn off reality.” I asked her a question I can’t remember and got an answer I can’t remember. Who was she? What did it mean that she could turn off reality?

I think the dream had to do with something I read about online about Alfred Korzybski who came up with the phrase “the map is not the territory.” I posted a blog entry about that concept before. Descriptions and even the evidence of our eyes and ears don’t really capture reality. There’s always a layer of perception and always something missing.

I think my dream was about maps and models of reality. Like maybe this was the territory? If so it didn’t make sense. Outside changed to inside. Furniture changed or was forgotten. People were vague. I somehow accepted I was on a spaceship, but it didn’t seem like a spaceship at all. It seemed like earth.

Maybe it was flat because it was the map?

Anyway it occurs to me that it’s probably maps all the way down. Turn off one layer of reality and you find another. They’re all “accurate” maps, depending on the scale you want to look at. You don’t really need a globe until you pan out far enough. Flat works as long as you only care about a small area of the earth.

Maybe that’s how you your “spaceship” moves. By turning off the models that don’t fit anymore.