I’m sitting down to watch a ln award winning movie with my wife. All we know is it takes place 80,000 years ago. The movie begins underwater. Across the screen, the camera is submerged in some sort of pool. Then we see the bodies of human women floating, but they are wearing dresses made of beautiful blues and burnt orange. They are performing some sort of ritual. The camera rises out of the water and they are in an intricate ceremonial bathhouse, beautifully tiled and decorated. “This doesn’t make sense,” says my wife. I look at her. “I think she (the director) is saying this is what was going on 80,000 years ago,” I say. I’m smiling at the idea. The view pans out the window, and there’s an incredible hydroponic system of agriculture interlaced with enormous stone and metal buildings stretching across the leafy green landscape. There is a feeling of beautiful abandonment and disrepair in the scene. The view pans up and we gasp as it shows a forest of trees as green specks at the base of an immense tower, branching upward from the ground with curved legs like a spider’s web being stretched to the sky from a point in the middle. The scale is difficult to grasp. I realize, as the view pans upwards to wards the sky that the central spire (now long and thin, pushing through the clouds) is designed to jettison a donut-shaped ship that is resting on the spire outwards into space. It’s a space “elevator.” Now I am in the scene, climbing on the outside of one of the immense legs of the spire with a co-conspirator. We are thieves of some kind, or possibly explorers, climbing the outer edge of the impossibly large structure. We are climbing shockingly high off the ground, crawling around on the leg, which seems to have its own weak gravitational pull. “Has anyone ever tried going up this?” I ask. The man I am with, a handsome older Black gentleman with a stoic gaze, smiles as he pulls himself over a ledge. “Never,” he lies. I can see it in his eyes. Then he points at something in the distance. Another tower, as enormous as this one, is a distant hazy shadow against the cloud cover. It is launching one of its payloads into space - The toroidal-shaped craft shoots upward at incredible speed and breaks through the clouds, cracking the atmosphere open with its power. The sight is spectacular. I suddenly slip on my footing - I reach frantically for a handhold but the surface is too smooth. I drop. Wind whistles in my ears as I watch the ground rushing toward me… and I stop inches from the ground. I wake up.