I had a dream about an interesting thing.  I was about the size and shape and usefulness of a coffee table, but it was one wide-tired wheel with a fender.  I remember putting it together when Steven Spielberg insisted that it have a shelf on the lower trailing edge of the fender.  It would follow you around, always giving you a place to put things down.

It was such a cool device, appearing in the context of a larger dream about riding with some friends in a switch-yard locomotive to a place where I had stored a pile of my old stuff, that I was very impressed.  I wanted to remember this part of my dream, and I remember every time I became slightly awake, like to change positions in bed, I would make sure I thought about this thing and make sure I remembered it.

I remember being half-awake and thinking about how this dream-made device could actually work.  I thought about the Segway and it’s self-stabilizing abilities.

So imagine a wheel about 8 inches across and two feet in diameter, with a 180˚ fender that attaches to the hub of the wheel.  It has a tray on the top to hold your things, and, at Spielberg’s insistence, another foot-sized platform about half way down the wheel attached to the bottom edge of the fender.  It is self-stabilized and follows you wherever you go.  To turn it leans slightly as it rolls.  I worked that part out in my sleep.

Now that I am writing about it, I realize that the wheel has to have something to push against so the fender doesn’t just fall over, so there’d have to be some kind of little rods with wheels on them attached to each end of the fender to when the motor applied power to the axle, it pushes against the little wheel and makes the thing actually move.

I wish I could draw…