I went to a children's museum yesterday called the Exploratorium (I don't know if anyone lives around San Francisco, but all the schools take field trips there). It's a huge hall filled with strange experiments that are designed to totally screw with your mind and teach you something about science.

They have all these optical illusions that really made me feel like I was in a dream. In one, you stare at a spinning field of dots, and then look down at your hand to see it all mutating like the skin on your palm is bulging and twisting.

There's another where you use some device to block your peripheral vision and make someone's head disappear. It makes them look like they are only floating eyes.

Then they have all these screwball devices set up that use magnets and mirrors to make wierd stuff happen.

They have a giant 30 foot tall spherical maze set up in the middle of the place called "the tactile dome". It's completely dark inside, and you crawl around in a maze where the walls are covered in weird textures. The floor and walls move and vibrate and breathe. Very disorientating.

The whole place was like one giant failed Reality Check. It certainly screwed up my dreams last night.

Next time anybody tells me that weird stuff does not happen in real life, and they don't know when to perform reality checks, I'm going to take them to this place.

Check out their website.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/